My Hero School Adventure is All Wrong, As Expected

by storybookknight

Hikigaya Hachiman is the last person on earth who should ever apply to U.A. High School. Yet somehow, he gets in anyway. In a world of irrepressible optimism and idealism, these are the adventures of a young man who believes that idealism is a lie.

30. Naturally, Video Games were Pointless

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

A/N: It's still 12/5 in some parts of the globe! I blame all chapter delays on Cyberpunch 2077.

If you're reading this somewhere other than Spacebattles, I generally post any updates on the status of the next chapter there, so feel free to stop by if you're curious as to why I don't make the update by a specified date. This update in particular was late because it's about 8000 words longer than I planned - the ideas just kept coming, and turned an end-of-chapter snippet into a full chapter in and of itself.

Next chapter won't be for a while; I have a lot of plotting to do in order to make sure that the Stain arc dovetails neatly with the following arcs, and I think I'm going back to slightly longer chapters in general. Very Tentative Update Date is 1/5/2021, but I might throw out some omakes and stuff before then.

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

Sneaking bites of a chocolate bar in the back of the classroom made me feel like a delinquent, but by running my borrowed digestion quirk at full blast for the entire rest of the day, I was able to raise my body fat by enough that Recovery Girl reluctantly signed off on my continued participation in the internship so long as I 'kept up the good work.'

Less than five minutes later, I handed in my internship selection to Aizawa-sensei. As he read it, his eyebrows climbed up his forehead, disappearing under his long bangs. "The Cyberpunch Agency?" Aizawa said, sounding surprised. "Not exactly what I expected." He looked up at me, his dark eyes boring into mine. "Why there? You had better offers."

"Investigative work seems like it would be a good fit for my strengths and weaknesses," I lied, doing my best not to flinch away from his gaze. Cyberpunch hadn't exactly warned me not to talk about the investigation with anyone, but I wasn't about to take any chances. More to the point, I could easily imagine UA's teachers taking a dim view of my decision to use a school internship as a means of pursuing my own self-satisfaction and revenge. "I could use my quirk analysis capabilities for investigations, and save up my bursts of power for when I need them." Besides, even though I was lying, the lies contained just enough truth that they would probably pass muster.

Aizawa stared at me searchingly for a second before putting the paper away. "Your choice," he said. "If you change your mind before the end of the day tomorrow, let me know."

"Yo, Hikigaya, you done yet? Get your ass in gear, already!" Bakugo hollered from the classroom entrance. "How long does it take to hand in a piece of paper?"

"Coming," I shouted at the door, then gave Aizawa-sensei a quick nod of farewell. Surprisingly, as I approached the door, Bakugo was no longer paying me any attention. Instead, he - and everyone else in the hallway with him - were laser-focused on the muscular, approaching form of All Might.

"I Am Here… walking through the hallways like a normal teacher!" All Might proclaimed. "Good afternoon, students!"

"Whoa," I could just barely hear a hushed, worshipful whisper. "I mean, I knew you guys got to have classes with All Might, but still! He's right there!" After a second, I pinned down the source of the whisper to an unexpected face. Totsuka Saika was standing next to Yuigahama and Bakugo, his eyes sparkling with all of the excited fervor of a teenage girl seeing her celebrity crush for the first time.

"Good afternoon, All Might-sensei!" Yuigahama chirped cheerfully. "Did you need anything? Or are you just saying hi?"

All Might raised one massive, beefy fist to his mouth and coughed politely. "Actually, Yuigahama-shojo, the faculty asked me to pass on a message to Midoriya-shonen regarding his internship choices."

Uh huh. I'll just bet they did. Reflexively, I twisted my head to look behind me into the classroom. Midoriya was still there, carefully organizing his internship offers as he put the sizable ream of pages away. "Midoriya," I called out over my shoulder. "Your d-" I bit my tongue just in time. "Um, All Might-sensei's looking for you."

"Huh?" Midoriya's head jerked upwards from his rapt focus on his notebooks. "O-oh! Uh, thank you! I'll be right out."

I gave All Might a friendly nod as I passed him on my way out of the classroom, then turned to meet up with the group waiting in the hall. "Sorry about that, guys," I said. "Thanks for waiting."

"Hmph." Uncharacteristically for Bakugo, instead of chewing me out once again for my lateness or otherwise taking the opportunity to make an obnoxious comment, he jammed his hands into his pockets and just started walking towards the front door.

"It's okay, Hachiman!" Saika said, beaming from ear to ear. "If you hadn't had to turn in whatever that was, I wouldn't have gotten to see All Might!"

I blinked. Apparently Saika was coming with us? I was torn between berating myself for not being the one who invited him - not that I knew his number to be able to do so in the first place - and being happy to see him. Either way, I decided not to say anything about it, in case he thought I was mad at a non-hero being invited or something. "Oh, it was just my choice for my hero internship," I mumbled instead in response. As I fell in with the rest of the group as we started following behind Bakugo (and Yuigahama, who had sped up to catch up to him) I saw that Saika wasn't the only addition to those of us who had been present at lunch. Mina Ashido was bouncing around excitedly as she attempted to explain just how awesome the Jawa Arcade was to a politely interested Yaoyorozu and a dubious-looking Yukinoshita.

"Man, you already picked, Pres?" Kirishima said eagerly, wiping his face with his sleeve as he made his way back from the water fountain. "I kinda figured you'd be working your way through that big stack of offers like Midoriya. Did you decide to just take the Bakugo route and go for the top spot?"

I shook my head, a little off-kilter at Kirishima's over-friendliness. "I went with Cyberpunch," I said. I didn't feel like repeating my whole explanation to Aizawa, and mentioning the Nomu investigation was a bad idea for multiple reasons, so in the end I settled on just letting him draw his own conclusions.

It may have been a mistake. Kirishima's eyes widened, then he grinned. "Oh, I see how it is. You got a chance to intern with your hero crush, huh?" He raised one eyebrow suggestively.

"What? No!" I sputtered, warding his accusations away with my hands in front of my face.

Kirishima laughed, clapping me on the arm with an open palm as he said, "I'm just kidding man, it was a joke!" Then his voice dropped to a low murmur. "Though if you were interning with a hot older woman just because you wanted to get to know her better, that'd be manly as hell. Right Totsuka-san?" Kirishima said, turning his attention to Saika and bringing him into the conversation deliberately.

"Eh?" Saika said, surprised at being addressed so suddenly, but after a second he smiled, looking happy to be included in 'bro talk'. "Uhm, I mean, it's probably not the best idea for learning how to be a hero, but yeah it'd be pretty cool, I think!"

I rolled my eyes. "Sorry to disappoint you," I said sarcastically.

"Eijiro-kun! It's an emergency!" Thankfully, the uncomfortable conversation was derailed by a pink-skinned dynamo of energy that popped up from behind us, tugging on Kirishima's sleeve. "Neither Yaoyorozu-chan or Yukinoshita-chan have ever played Dance Hero: Shining Stage before! We've got to go there first thing once we get to the arcade! Lives may be in the balance!" She stared up at Kirishima with pleading eyes, though the cheerful grin on her face took away some of the urgency.

"Fuck that," a call came from ahead of us. Bakugo twisted over his shoulder to look back at us. "This many people, if we decide what we're doing based on whoever whines the loudest, we'll spend more time arguing than we will playing. Only way to do it is, winner picks the next machine."

"What?" Mina said, shaking her head at Bakugo. "That's stupid. We can totally all figure out where to go as a group, right Pres?" She said, turning and giving me black-scleraed puppy dog eyes.

It figured that Bakugo would come up with a pointlessly competitive method of deciding where to go. While I was also an experienced arcade-goer, I favored the much more expedient method of choosing where to go by going alone and therefore having nobody to argue with. All things considered though, given the size of our group he sort of had a point so I shrugged. "Actually, " I said, "I'm on Bakugo's side."

"Starting with Fatal Strife," Bakugo quickly added to cut off Ashido's next suggestion. "Because I said so."

"What? Even if we're going to be doing some dumb 'winner picks' rule, you can't just decide…" The bickering continued as we made our way into the train station. Luckily, the afternoon train wasn't nearly as crowded as the morning train due to the fact that we were no longer competing with all of the commuting salarymen heading into downtown Tokyo from the suburbs. There wasn't so much room that any of us were able to grab a seat, of course, but we were able to stand in a rough group and keep up the conversation without having to split up or risking rom-com cliches like sudden turns of the train sending girls swaying into the arms of the Hayama-like protagonist.

Of course, given the lack of protagonists around here, the girls would be more likely to collide with a wall instead. Bakugo technically had the looks to be a romantic lead, but given that he was the personality equivalent of an open sewer, as a love interest he would appeal to niche markets at best. The same went for Saika; not many readers would be likely to be interested in a male lead with more feminine charm than they themselves possessed. I myself, naturally, was more likely to be considered as the socially awkward antagonist whose unwanted attentions had to be fended off. That left the best choice for a 'protecting the female lead during public transit event' as Kirishima, and he was basically a wall anyways. In short, the odds of a cliche event taking place during public transit was narratively unlikely, to say the least.

So, when Yuigahama leaned a little too far during one particular turn and her shoulder brushed against mine, I didn't make the mistake of reaching out to steady her, and refused to consider the question of whether she had done it deliberately. The contact was a process of the random Brownian motion of bodies inside a train carriage, no matter how nice Yuigahama's shampoo smelled, or how warm the skin of her arm had been against the skin of my own. My days of crushing on girls because our fingers accidentally touched as we picked up the same pencil, or because they had looked like they were waving to me and actually were talking to their friend behind me, were done and over with.

But I couldn't help but turn my head slightly to look at Yuigahama anyways.

She saw me look at her and beamed at me. "Hehe," Yuigahama laughed, her warm red eyes squinting closed with cheerfulness. "Isn't this exciting Hikki?"

"It's a train ride," I said in a deadpan. "Exciting isn't exactly a word I would use."

"Hikki!" Yuigahama said in exasperation. "You knew what I meant. Hanging out with everybody outside of class! Having fun! Doing stuff together besides push-ups!"

"Hey, it's not like all we ever do is push-ups," I said with a smirk. "There's squats, sprints, sit-ups…"

"Ugh," Yuigahama groaned. "Push-ups, workouts, whatever! The point is, we're doing fun stuff for once!"

"Fair enough," I said. "And yeah, it's pretty nice. I'm a little surprised, though," I said, "You sound like you haven't been hanging out much with anybody. I thought you were sort of close with your friends from middle school?" I asked.

A troubled expression flashed across Yuigahama's face. "I mean, I am, but like… I dunno. Between all the homework UA gives, and all the extra work I've been doing for the Sports Festival, I've just been so busy. They've invited me out a couple times, and I haven't had any time to hang out with them so I had to turn them down, and now it feels kinda awkward. The last time I actually hung out with anybody was when I went to the movies with Yukinon, back during the time off we had after the, um, the USJ attack."

As Yuigahama trailed off awkwardly, I forced myself to smile at her. "You guys talked after that, huh? That's good," I said.

"What about you, Hikki?" Yuigahama asked softly. "Did you talk to anybody, you know, after?"

After I found out that my … that Zaimokuza was probably dead at the hands of one of All Might's personal villains? I'd spent the entire week exercising and obsessively stockpiling quirks. Even if I'd had any friends left alive, it wouldn't exactly have been the first thing on my mind. "Actually…" I said, "I talked to Cyberpunch, you know, the day after." About how I could help the police catch the person responsible, but still. That counted, right? "It helped a lot," I added, hoping to get Yuigahama to stop worrying.

"Oh!" Yuigahama said. She raised her eyebrows in a look of surprised understanding. "No wonder you decided to intern with her," she mumbled.

I didn't really like the look of sympathy in Yuigahama's eyes, but before I could correct it, the train screeched to a stop at the Kaihimmakuhari station, and we all piled out of the train and on towards our destination. The Makuhari neighborhood of Chiba had an old-timey, retro-futuristic look to it; the big buildings a few blocks down the street from the train station all looked like they were made of smooth, shining chrome and glass, while the residential neighborhoods closer to the station tended to have quirky architecture, or had offbeat storefronts on the ground floor with residential apartments above. The Jawa Arcade sat on the border between the two districts, close enough to the big hotels downtown that bored tourists looking for something to do after they got sick of the rides at Destinyland could walk there comfortably, but close enough to the places that the locals actually lived that it got some actual foot traffic.

The arcade itself didn't look like much from the outside. It had a big, boxy look to it, as though it had been a department store of some kind once upon a time, but rather than a typical bland off-white exterior it had at some point been painted rust-red. The inside was another story. An overpriced food court dominated about half of the lower floor of the building, its walls covered with televisions tuned to game livestreams and professional e-sports matches, and the area nearest the entrance had a counter for exchanging prize tickets, but the other half of the bottom floor and the entire top floor were jam-packed full of arcade machines.

"How interesting," Yaoyorozu said, her eyes sparkling. "You told me this place was large, but I hadn't expected it to be quite this large." She scanned the room for a few seconds, putting one finger to her chin. "On the other hand, it looks like they have multiple copies of some machines, which you wouldn't need for a home arcade, so maybe it's less impressive than it looks?"

I gave her a sidelong glance. Who had a home arcade in the first place?

"I hadn't realized it would be quite this noisy," Yukinoshita said with a wince, pitching her voice to be heard over the cacophony of bells, bleeps, bloops, and bangs coming from the various machines.

"I know, isn't it great?" Kirishima said with a grin.

Yuigahama patted Yukinoshita on the arm. "It's okay once you get used to it," she said.

"Come on you losers, we're wasting time," Bakugo said, motioning to the devices that dispensed point cards for operating the machines. "Let's get your asskickings over with."

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

"What? Hikigaya you disreputable cockroach!" Yukinoshita shouted at me with indignation. "Stand still and accept your - no!"

"You should try this combat technique I've heard of called 'dodging,' Yukinoshita," I said as the grey-haired old drunk guy I was controlling stumbled out of harm's way into Crane Stance, then proceeded to jump-kick the young girl wearing a cybernetically enhanced panda mascot costume in the face. "I hear it's supposed to be useful."

"Oh, for-" Pounding the buttons of the arcade machine frantically, Yukinoshita managed to get her panda mascot girl to roll away from my unrealistically spry old drunk. I didn't follow up to put pressure on her, letting her get to her feet. "You know I've never played this game before!"

"I have to say, you're not doing half bad, for a button-masher," I said. As Yukinoshita lucked into a special move, the panda-mech's shoulders sprung open, revealing missile racks that disgorged their contents at my drunken master. I countered her move with one of my own, causing my character to take a deep swig from a stereotypical squash-shaped jug before breathing a massive gout of fire that enveloped the missiles and caused them to detonate prematurely.

"Suck it, Spiky Hair!" Bakugo crowed from the machine next to us. "Eat Obliteration Knee!"

"Dude, you just destroyed me, holy crap." Kirishima said in shock.

"Damn right I did, who's next?!"

I rolled my eyes and proceeded to finish Yukinoshita off by making my character drop into a weird crouch, then punch her panda-mech in the knees until she ran out of health. "One more round?" I asked her. "Looks like it's just Totsuka and Bakugo left, but we should probably still have time for another round."

"That's all right," Yukinoshita said, stepping away from the machine with a sigh of poorly-concealed frustration. "If they're the finalists, we might as well watch them."

"Fair enough." I said, stepping away from the machine and surreptitiously wringing out my hands. Since my hands were free, I grabbed a packet of M's & N's out of my pocket, pouring a handful of the candy-covered chocolate bits into the palm of my hand. "Want some?" I asked Yukinoshita, holding out the still half-full package in her direction.

"No thank you," Yukinoshita said with a polite smile. "So, who do you think will win?" She asked, gesturing at the machine, where Saika was nervously stepping up to face a cocky-looking Bakugo.

"I dunno," I said. "Saika beat me pretty thoroughly in the first round, but it looks like Bakugo's pretty good at this game."

"Yeah man," Kirishima said as he overheard our conversation. "He pretty much just comboed me to death before I could even do anything."

"Really?" I asked curiously. "Who's he playing as?"

"Onima," Kirishima said in disgust. "Frickin' cheap-ass chain spamming…"

"Heh. Saika's a Hiro main," I said. "How's that for a classic match-up?"

Yukinoshita looked back and forth between Kirishima and me with an amused look on her face. "And what does that mean in Japanese?" She asked.

I felt my ears get a little warmer. "Oh, uh. So, Bakugo's playing as a guy who used to be a secret boss in an earlier game in the series, this, uh, I guess you'd call him a Yakuza crime lord, but he's got a 'cursed tattoo' holding a demon on his back, except the demon is actually a computer virus? The character Saika's playing was the protagonist of that game, an ordinary gamer with a Virtualization Quirk who isekaied himself into the game to keep the virus from destroying the game world."

"I… see?" Yukinoshita said dubiously.

I snorted. "Yeah, fighting games aren't exactly known for their plots."

As Bakugo and Saika's digital avatars began to battle, the group crowded around the arcade machine, shouting encouragement at Saika and Bakugo whenever they pulled off a particularly well-timed move. As the tinny shouts of 'Blazing Bandit Chain!' and 'Virtua Saber!' emanating from the arcade machine's speakers, Yukinoshita leaned in a little bit closer to me, pitching her voice a little lower in order to keep it from being overheard by everyone else with us. "You know, my sister had to pull some strings to be able to make you an offer," she said. "She was quite upset when she realized that UA was only allowing pros to offer a maximum of two internships. Are you really interning with Cyberpunch?" Yukinoshita asked.

"Uh, yeah," I said. "Sorry, I guess?"

She shook her head. "Oh no, don't get me wrong, seeing Haruno-nee-san not getting everything she wants for once is worth it, even if just for novelty's sake alone." I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stayed quiet, watching as Bakugo clinched the first round by wrapping his character's chain whip around Saika's character's leg, then whipped him around like a rag-doll, slamming him into the ground over and over. "I just thought I should warn you. If you don't take her up on her offer, you'll likely be burning a bridge." She smiled wryly. "Haruno-nee-san can be a bit… proud."

I shrugged uncomfortably. "That sucks, but..." I trailed off, not sure how to finish my sentence. No matter what, I was taking that internship with Cyberpunch. Even if Campestris was probably exactly the sort of hero I would want to be like if was actually serious about the idea of working as a hero full-time. A fancy office in the city, lucrative advertising contracts instead of having to risk my neck all day - being rich and famous wasn't everything in life, but it sure wasn't nothing, either. Yeah, I regretted it, just a little.

When it became clear that I wasn't going to say anything else, Yukinoshita smiled, a strangely satisfied look. "That's what I thought you'd say," she said cryptically.

"Fuck!" Bakugo shouted as Saika's longcoat-wearing high school student conjured a pair of glowing phantom longswords out of thin air and ran his yakuza gangster through with them, evening up the score.

"Alright, Saika!" Yuigahama shouted. "Way to turn it around! Keep it up!"

"Come on, Bakugo!" Mina cheered back. "You can do it! Get that focus back!"

"Last round," Saika said gamely. As he focused intently on the screen, I noticed that from behind, he didn't seem to have quite as girlish a figure as he had a few weeks ago. Maybe it was my imagination, but as his shoulders tensed and he got ready to react, I saw a hint of muscle to them that nudged him a few points towards the masculine side of the androgynous scale. "Are you ready, Katsuki?" He asked.

"That's it, time to break out all the stops." Bakugo's lips curled up into a savage grin in lieu of an answer. As the round started, his character started glowing with a corona of fire, his suit jacket ripping open to reveal a pair of fiery wings. "Eat Balrog mode!" Matching words to actions, his fighter swung his metal chain, which now dripped with flame. "Khazad-dûm Cataclysm!" the arcade machine chirped.

Not to be outdone, Totsuka slammed his joystick to the right to send his isekai protagonist backflipping out of the way, then initiated a transformation of his own. His character's hair suddenly grew out in length, while his right hand sprouted a sword that glowed with violet light. His left hand, however, sprouted a pistol, which immediately started rapidly shooting balls of hot plasma to the machine's cries of "Gun Gale!"

Next to me, Yukinoshita frowned. "If they could transform into some kind of super mode, why didn't they do that from the beginning?"

I pointed at the upper-right corner of the screen. "See under the health bars, the blue bar that's slowly decreasing? That's their NT gauge."

"NT?" Yukinoshita asked.

"Narrative Tension," I said, smirking at the ridiculousness of it all. "Shonen fight scenes never break out the transformation sequences until the climax, or unless they can't win without it. It's sort of like a super bar from other games, except in this game it automatically maxes out during boss fights, and it recovers in general when you get beat up."

"I… see," Yukinoshita said with a sigh.

As Bakugo and Saika's health gauges dipped lower and lower, the tension in the air thickened until finally Bakugo backed away to get a little room, then fired off a massive projectile at close range. Even on a block, the giant fireball had the potential to chip through the rest of Saika's health bar - but in the next split second, Saika had conjured a barrier surrounded in green-glowing 'code lines' that reflected the fireball. Still stunned from the aftermath of firing the projectile, Bakugo's character couldn't dodge in time, and was knocked out by their own super move.

"I did it!" Saika shouted, throwing his hands in the air excitedly.

Bakugo stared at the screen for a second before pushing himself away in disgust. "Piece of shit sticky buttons," he blustered.

"Hey, no worries, Bakugo," Kirishima said, putting a hand on Bakugo's shoulder in consolation. "It was super close."

"Yeah, well, I'm getting fucking sick of close losses," Bakugo said, shrugging Kirishima's hand off his shoulder brusquely.

"That was fun!" Saika said, turning to smile at Bakugo. "You're really good, Katsuki!"

Bakugo shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away instead of replying. There were a few seconds of awkward silence (or relative silence anyways, the place was still only a few decibels less than cacophonous) before Yaoyorozu stepped in to fill the void. "Well, Totsuka-kun, since you won, where should we go next?"

Saika put one finger to his chin, tilting his head in a way that utterly erased any lingering aura of masculinity that he had been displaying. "Hmmm…"

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

"Kirishima, you have to duck those!" I shouted, the plastic pistol bucking in my hands as I fired at the insectile aliens encroaching on the screen. Honestly, I was a little bit surprised that the arcade still had this machine; there had been a petition going around lately online claiming that games which depicted 'inhuman' monsters as things deserving being slaughtered was racist against heteromorphs. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't that surprising. Was an arcade without Slime Crisis really an arcade at all?

"Dude, I don't really do ducking," Kirishima complained, cheerfully doing his best to try anyways as another wave of acidic projectiles was fired towards the screen. Even crouched, his spiky red hair stuck out over the lip of the 'cover' built into the arcade cabinet. I shook my head and fired at the projectiles, doing my best to shoot them down before they could get to us, but even so our shared health bar still took another hit. "That's what my Quirk is supposed to be for!" He said with a grin, popping back up.

"I noticed," I said, managing to clear off the group of enemies with assistance from an age-old videogame cliche of a conveniently nearby barrel full of some kind of explodium.

"Ooh, shotgun," Kirishima said, shooting for the powerup before I could get to it in time. "Hey, do you think UA would go for installing machines like this at school? We could say it's for dodging practice or something!"

I laughed, firing frantically as I tried to clear out the assembled enemies with just a handgun anyways. "We should ask Snipe-sensei, I bet he'd go for it."

"No way, we can't ask Snipe!" Kirishima said in mock-panic, enthusiastically firing the shotgun for all of five seconds before he ate a slime bullet in the face. "He'd hog all the high scores!"

"Somehow I don't think we've got much of a chance at them even if he didn't," I said as a wave of green goo slowly coated the screen everywhere but the center, where the words 'game over' appeared as holes in the ooze.

"Hey, you never know," Kirishima said. "I mean, for all we know, everybody else might be just as bad at the game as we - wow, okay, never mind." On the machine to our right, Yukinoshita and Yaoyorozu had teamed up and were thoroughly, systematically demolishing the stage. He let out a low whistle. "Damn, we should have lost earlier."

I couldn't help but laugh. What was I even supposed to say to that? Was this the fabled, stereotypical 'guy talk' that riajuus indulged in? I mean, yeah - watching the two girls move in synch as they ducked to avoid projectiles and twisted to fire as enemies appeared was incredibly distracting, but that wasn't exactly something I was used to saying out loud. "Haha, yeah," I muttered, just for the sake of making a response.

"Dude, we're so damn lucky," Kirishima said, turning to look in the other direction, where Ashido was enthusiastically flailing at the screen next to a much more reserved Saika, and Yuigahama did her best to keep up with a snarling, aggressive Bakugo. "I don't think there's a single girl in our class who isn't at least a seven out of ten. And, like, in middle school?" He shook his head. "No way my friends and I would have gotten a bunch of girls to come with us to Jawa. I mean, damn."

"You come here pretty frequently, then?" I asked, seizing on the chance to move the conversation back to more familiar territory.

Kirishima paused for a second. "I mean, I used to? About a year ago I started getting super serious about the whole hero training thing, so I was too busy trying to get ready for the entrance exam to hang out much. I don't even know how long it's been since the last time I was here."

I let out a heavy sigh. "I know exactly what you mean. I haven't bought a new game for my Vita X in… probably over a year, anyway." I paused for a second, thinking about it, then shook my head. "Even if I had time to play one, I keep spending all of my allowance on, like, protein supplements and crap." Even as I lamented my own lack of downtime over the past year, though… it was nice to hear that I wasn't necessarily alone.

"Damn, nice," Kirishima said, eyeing me respectfully. "I need to get on that sometime. You got any tips for like, what to buy and stuff?"

I smirked derisively. "If you'd asked me last week, maybe I would have had some, but I just got chewed out by Recovery Girl for my terrible nutrition, so you probably don't want advice from me. Honestly? You should talk to Lunch Rush-sensei."

Kirishima raised his eyebrows. "Really? Huh. I'll have to give that a try." He paused for a second, then grinned. "Yo, Bakugo, Yuigahama. You guys wipe out too?" He called out over my shoulder.

Bakugo sneered. "Only because Airhead here got distracted."

"We were losing anyway," Yuigahama said dismissively. "So what was so funny?" She asked, her eyes bright and full of smiles as she walked up. "It must have been good if Hikki was laughing."

"What? I laugh," I said defensively. "Anyways, we were talking about…" I met Kirishima's red-pupiled eyes, remembered what he had actually been talking about, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. "You know, how neither of us have had free time since middle school, how bad we were sucking at the game, that sort of thing."

"Yeah! I mean, I was never any good at shooters, but still!" Kirishima agreed, a little too enthusiastically.

Yuigahama looked at us sort of suspiciously, but thankfully we were soon saved by the arrival of Saika and Ashido. "I'm just saying, that shooter was totally unrealistic," Ashido complained as she walked over. "I mean, I get it, it's a video game, I just think it's funny - all of that acid would have been, like, totally harmless, you know?"

"Um, well, I think the series is supposed to be from the point of view of a, um, quirkless police officer or something?" Saika said. "So they wouldn't have been immune at all."

"That's why I'm saying it's unrealistic," Ashido complained. "Like, where are all the Pro Heroes supposed to be while this alien invasion is happening? It needed some sort of explanation for why All Might didn't just show up and, like, punch the spaceship back up into space or something."

"I guess I never thought of that," Saika said thoughtfully. "It's probably because it's an older game? It's only been in the past few years that we've been able to make microchips any better than the ones they made before the Troubled Century, so if you can find machines that still work from the 2060s the games look almost as good as they do now."

"Yeah, Jawa Arcade's got all kinds of classic shit," Bakugo said, folding his arms and tapping one finger against his bicep in irritation. "Fuck, are they still going?"

I turned to follow his line of sight, where Yukinoshita and Yaoyorozu were indeed still shooting up a storm. A small crowd of curious onlookers had gathered behind them to watch their screen. "Looks like they've got an audience," I pointed out. "Should we go watch too?"

"The next aliens will be coming from the top-right and top-left, you should be able to shoot for a second or two before you have to duck!" Yaoyorozu shouted with excitement. Her dark eyes were shining as they focused on the screen intently, her arms holding the pistol in a stance that looked like it could have come out of a police serial on television.

"Got it!" In comparison, Yukinoshita seemed to be a bit more frazzled, looking like she was shooting on pure frantic instinct with an amateur's stance, but just like almost everything else that Yukinoshita Yukino was attempting for the first time, she was almost gratuitously competent at it despite her inexperience.

As we tried to get close enough to see the screen, the crowd that was forming the rough semicircle behind them reluctantly parted for us after seeing that we were all wearing the same school uniform. Yukinoshita and Yaoyorozu were shooting their way up scaffolding that surrounded a giant skyscraper, and looked to be nearing the top, where a flying alien saucer hovered overhead. It was a setup that screamed boss fight. "Wow! Yukinon, Yaomomo, way to go!" Yuigahama shouted.

As if prompted by Yuigahama's exclamation, a few of the other arcadegoers watching them play suddenly spoke up as well. "Damn, those UA kids can shoot!"

"You think they're from the Hero course?"

"Yeah, I recognize her, she was in the semi-finals!"

"Oh hey, the explosion kid's here too!"

If I had been in the middle of playing a game when all of the sudden I heard half a dozen people speak up from behind me, all watching me potentially make mistakes, I'm pretty sure that I would have immediately screwed up and died. If anything, however, hearing that she had an audience seemed to make Yukinoshita focus more intently. Yaoyorozu reacted a little more reasonably, taking a quick second of surprise to look over her shoulder at everyone watching, but Yukinoshita was quick to recall her attention. "Momo-chan! What's next?" Yukinoshita shouted.

"Oh! Right! There's just one big wave left, and then the boss! There's a rocket launcher that you can shoot down off of a helicopter flying by, but the ammunition is really limited, so it's best if one person goes for it and then holds their fire for the boss while the other person shoots the minions!" Yaoyorozu said rapidly. "Yukino-chan, think you can snag it?"

"Leave it to me!"

A few minutes and a few gratuitous explosions later, and the words "STAGE CLEAR!" sparkled brightly in the center of the screen. The crowd slowly dispersed, offering congratulations and brief applause before going back to their own gaming. One boy, who looked like he was still in middle school, stayed behind. "U-um," he stammered as he walked up to Yukinoshita. "I, um, I saw you in the Sports Festival! And, um, you were really cool! Can- can I have your autograph?" He squeaked out, his voice cracking on the last word.

Yukinoshita's eyes went wide, and a light dusting of pink appeared on her cheeks. "O-of course," she said, fumbling for the notebook that he was holding out with significantly less grace than she had been displaying during the game just a few seconds previous. "Um, and who should I make it out to?" She asked.

"Suzuki Yuuki!" He said excitedly. "It's the usual Suzuki, and then Yuuki is with Bravery and Heart. The way you use your quirk is so cool! I have kind of an enhancer quirk too, but it's solar powered instead of heat, so it's not quite as cool as yours - oh no, sorry, I didn't mean to make a pun or anything, it's just, you know, so cool! The way the ice forms all around you, and you, like make your own battlefield? If my quirk did that I'd just be like, who-pah, you know? Bam! Ice field! And then the ice skating! Like, I was thinking I could get some roller skates maybe or something, because it just looked like - whaw, you know?"

"I see," Yukinoshita said, a fixed smile on her face only poorly concealing her panic. Luckily, the kid didn't seem to be very observant. "Here you are."

He looked down at it. "In-ver-na?" He sounded out, apparently unfamiliar with the English letters.

"That's right," Yukinoshita said, maintaining that plastic smile.

"So cool." He whispered, before clutching his notebook to his chest and running off to join some nearby friends.

"That's so exciting, Yukinon! You got your first fan!" Yuigahama said as soon as he was out of earshot.

"Ugh, I'm so jealous!" Mina said, her eyes sparkling with more excitement than envy. "Dang it, why isn't there a kid who was super impressed by my awesome dance moves hanging out with him?"

"Oh no, I was hoping that I was going to be all of your guys' first fan!" Saika said in distress. "Katsuki, Hachiman, Yui, remind me to get an autograph from you tomorrow at school when I have paper!"

Bakugo, who had been looking a little irritated that the kid had blown right by him without seeming to recognize him, smirked at Saika. "Sorry. My old hag's got you beat by a lot. She insisted on being first."

At Saika's pout, Kirishima stepped in. "Family doesn't count, right?" he said.

"...aand a few of my friends from middle school," Bakugo admitted.

"Mine too," Yuigahama chimed in. "Sorry."

As Saika's face fell even further, I coughed. "Nobody's asked me for an autograph yet," I said.

"They haven't?" Saika said excitedly. "Okay, perfect! Tomorrow then, for sure!" As he smiled up at me, I almost felt like there should be flowers and rainbows appearing out of thin air behind him.

An image which was promptly shattered by the coarse voice of Bakugo Katsuki. "Yo, Ponytail!" He shouted, pitching his voice to carry above the din of the nearby arcade machines. "You had the high score. Where are we going next?"

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

"What made you pick this game?" I asked Yaoyorozu, settling into the arcade machine's bucket seat. The steering wheel and pedals were already at a more or less comfortable position, but they still adjusted themselves a little as the sensors in the seat compensated for my particular body shape. For all that it was basically a gimmick, I'm sure there were people with heteromorphic quirks who probably found adaptations like that to be really helpful. As expected of an official Hero Commission licensed product, I guess?

As the words 'Hero Racers 2112' appeared on the screen in brightly colored letters, Yaoyorozu looked over from the racer seat next to mine. "Mostly, I was looking for something I hadn't already played," she said.

"You mentioned a home arcade, earlier," I said. Before I could finish my question, though, the character select screen popped up, revealing that we had the option of choosing between dozens of heroes, each with their own specialized Go-Kart or Motorcycle, each with their own unique power… and apparently, it was first-come, first-serve. I cranked on the steering wheel wildly, aiming for Edgeshot on an off-road bike, but it was sniped out from underneath me by whoever the cyan cursor belonged to. I clicked my tongue in irritation and finally settled on Crust - why not, since he sent me the invite. I was a little unsure about the miniature monster truck he was driving, but then again, it wasn't like I really cared if I lost. I turned back to Yaoyorozu. "Are you talking, like… arcade machines, or…"

"My family is fairly wealthy," Yaoyorozu admitted. "It just so happens that my father enjoys collecting classic games as a hobby." As she spoke, I saw that she had picked Ryukyu, who was (as far as I could tell, anyway) the only racer without a kart at all, since she turned into a dragon and flew the course. "Anyway, since we've been playing against each other on separate machines all this time, I thought it would be fun for everyone to be able to go head-to-head at the same time."

As the race began, we were greeted by the spandex-clad form of All Might, who was holding a comically oversized green flag. It made sense that he was the race announcer, I guessed - probably the Hero Commission made him non-playable to prevent people from fighting over who got to play as him. Also, since the courses in this game didn't loop around, instead being a competition for who could get from the starting line to the scene of a disaster the fastest, they needed a hero who could realistically move even faster than all the other racers to be able to wave the flag at the finish line. "I'm not so sure about that," I said to Yaoyorozu as the countdown began. "The joke about this game is that it destroys friendships."

"What? Why?!" Yaoyorozu said in alarm, just in time for the flag to wave and the race to start.

I kept quiet, waiting for us to hit the first section of powerups. As Endeavor's Dragster roared across the Supply Crate and blew it to smithereens, Bakugo started laughing maniacally. "Die!" He shouted.

Suddenly Endeavor's car belched fire all over the track, sending the limousine-driving Gang Orca into a sudden tailspin that sent him careening into last place. "What the? Hey! Bakubaku you jerk!" Yuigahama shouted.

For my own part, as I received my own powerup, my monster truck suddenly conjured giant rocky plates over the outside of its wheels, which I promptly used to sideswipe a bright pink Wild Wild Pussycats-themed muscle car. From the color, I had expected to have hit Mina, but surprisingly I heard Yukinoshita cry out in indignation. "Who did that?!" She shouted.

"That's why," I said deadpan to Yaoyorozu.

"I see," she said, and promptly flew over my car, picked it up off the road, and dropped me facing the wrong direction. "You know," she said in amusement, "I've been thinking about it, and flying really does appear to be a very useful tool to potentially pick up."

I did my best to wrestle my slow-turning monster truck back into traveling the right direction, but managed to spare enough attention to respond. "Thinking about going with Air Jet?" I asked.

"Well… yes," Yaoyorozu said reluctantly, doing her best to recover from a tailspin as Wash's Fridge Racer blasted her out of the sky with a water geyser. "Tokoyami-kun made some very good points in class. It's just - I wish Air Jet had a better handle on the PR aspects of the job. I'm really not very confident on that aspect of things currently."

I frowned even as I used my monster truck's giant wheels to take a shortcut through a public park en route to the burning skyscraper we were racing to get to. "Why not?" I asked in confusion. "Aren't you already pretty good at it?"

After a second or two with no response, I took my eyes away from the screen for a second to take a peek at Yaoyorozu. She was also sneaking a look at me, as if trying to judge if I was serious. "I…" she said tentatively. "I mean…" Suddenly, her eyes went wide as she looked back at her screen. "Oh, shoot!"

"Wahahahaha!" Ashido crowed triumphantly. "Eat my soap suds!"

Sure enough, while Yaoyorozu had been distracted, Ashido had managed to slip and slide her way through the pack of racers into first place, and was aggressively maintaining her lead by virtue of laying down massive slicks of soap suds behind her. It was the sort of terrain my monster truck actually handled well, and the shortcut I had taken had done a lot to put me back in contention for the race - in theory. In practice, I wound up getting back onto the main track just in time for Bakugo's Endeavor to nuke my car with a massive gout of flame. After some jostling, cheap shots, aggressive disregard for traffic laws, and at least two incidences of rank betrayal, I wound up coming in third, behind Ashido in second, and Yuigahama, who as Gang Orca had surfed his limousine down one of Ashido's soap-waves to make it all the way into first place at the last second.

"Noooooo!" Ashido wailed dramatically. "I was so close! I thought I was finally gonna get to play Dance Hero!"

Yuigahama laughed. "You know what? Dance Hero sounds fun. I don't mind picking that next, Minamina!"

"Ohmigosh thank you Yui-chan, you're the best!" Mina shouted.

As everyone stood up from the arcade machine and started getting ready to head out, I noticed that Yaoyorozu was looking a little bit uneasy, glancing in my direction every couple of seconds. I sighed, before fishing the now-empty package of M's & N's out of my pocket. "I need to go get some more snacks," I said to the group, "you guys are headed over to the dancing games, right? I'll meet you over there."

"I could use something too," Yaoyorozu piped up. "Anybody else want a snack? My treat," she offered. "The two of us should have enough hands to bring back everything."

After collecting everyones' orders, Yaoyorozu and I walked towards the concession counter in silence. Slowly, the roar of the arcade machines subsided, to be replaced by the thumping bass of the blueswave house music. "I'm no good at talking to ordinary people," Yaoyorozu blurted out abruptly as we stepped into the line leading to the cash register.

I raised an eyebrow. "Define ordinary," I said. "People with average quirks? Non-heroes? No matter how bad you think you are at talking to them, I guarantee you, it can't be as bad as Bakugo is."

Yaoyorozu smiled weakly. "No, not at all," she said. "It's not about people's quirks, it's, well-" she broke off, shaking her head. "You know what?" she asked, slightly helplessly. "It's nothing."

That, not to put too fine a point on it, sounded like bullshit to me. "Are you having trouble with your HEART group?" I asked. Judging by her flinch, I had hit the nail on the head. "I kind of wondered why you kept coming over to eat with our table for lunch instead of hanging out with those guys. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, just..."

"No, I understood what you meant," Yaoyorozu reassured me.

I paused for a second. "Actually, who's even in your HEART group? Tokoyami, right?" I asked.

"And Midoriya, and Uraraka," Yaoyorozu agreed. "But I wouldn't call it trouble, exactly. More like... " after trailing off for a second, she let out a heavy sigh. "It's just hard for me to find a place, there. I just can't seem to talk to any of them. Midoriya seems to be almost afraid of me, Tokoyami is…" She paused, trying to figure out exactly how to describe him.

"Overly dramatic?" I suggested.

"Yes, thank you," Yaoyorozu said. "And Uraraka…" She sighed. "We seem to have almost nothing in common, and when I mention anything about, about my family, or my living conditions, she gives me this look -" She cut herself off.

I didn't really know much about Uraraka. I think we'd only spoken once or twice, but from bits and pieces of conversation I'd overheard in class I'd gotten the impression that she wasn't exactly well off. Which begged the question, "So… just how wealthy is your family?" I asked.

Shamefaced, Yaoyorozu muttered, "We own a major corporation that dominates the Russian import/export business."

"I see." As we finally made it to the register, I normally would have paid for my own snacks out of a stubborn sense of pride, but in the wake of that revelation I decided to just keep quiet when Yaoyorozu pulled out a jet-black credit card from her wallet. "So… I guess the one thing that I don't really get is, if you're worried about not being able to talk to people who come from more normal families, why are you thinking about interning with Uwabami over Air Jet? Isn't she kind of a celebrity?"

"It's not just my family background," Yaoyorozu said. "It's also the fact that, well, UA is a very academically rigorous school, but even among people who are all more intelligent and studied than average, I still feel like when I accidentally get excited about an academic topic, people either can't follow, or they think I'm talking down to them; it just doesn't seem like a coincidence that the only people who seem to want to be my friend are either the sorts who can make friends with everyone like Yui-chan, or people like you and Yukino-chan and Bakugo and Todoroki, who are all at the top of the class academically."

If it had been anybody else saying this, I would have assumed that they were trying to humblebrag, but Yaoyorozu's downcast face was completely sincere. Which made it even more ironic, because that meant that she was honestly and openly asking me for help with making friends. Obviously, I had no advice to give. But if it was just sympathy… well, I knew what not having them was like, at least. "If it helps, I don't think you're stuck up," I said, "and I only got a sixty-three on our last math quiz."

Yaoyorozu's dark, almond-shaped eyes went wide. "You did? Really?"

I shrugged, embarrassed. "I'm a lot better at Japanese," I mumbled.

After a few seconds, Yaoyorozu finally spoke up. "In that case... do you want to study together?" Yaoyorozu offered. "It might just be that your middle school didn't do a great job with some of the math fundamentals that you need as prerequisites, I've read that a gap in learning like that can cause problems down the road. I have some great resource books that would probably be fairly helpful to you, especially with finals coming up soon and -"

I couldn't help it. I laughed. "You know what? Sure," I said. "I could use the help."

For a minute or so, as we walked towards the dancing game section with snacks in tow, I tried to figure out what to say next. How did people actually make friends on purpose, anyway? If I knew, I would have applied that ability a long time ago. But it felt like I had to tell her something, give her some form of consolation more than just a shitty self-deprecating comment.

Unfortunately, by the time that we had made it back to the group, nothing had come to mind. I looked over at Yaoyorozu to apologize and at least say something, but as I was about to say something she looked at me and smiled, seeming much more relieved. As she walked forward cheerfully, her hands full of Venus Bars and Danish Fish for the people who had requested them, I once again realized that I didn't understand women in the slightest.

Among the many other things I didn't understand was the appeal of dancing video games. Call me old-fashioned, but video gaming was the sort of activity best accomplished while sitting on a couch, completely zoning out and dead to the world. Why anybody would want to ruin that with a bunch of completely unnecessary jumping around was entirely beyond me. Everyone else looked like they were having fun; Kirishima and Saika were both awkwardly picking their way through a slower-paced hip-hop song, Yuigahama and Yukinoshita were dancing together on a pop tune that looked like it required some actual coordination and teamwork between the players, while Bakugo was desperately stomping his way through a fast-paced techno track that Mina seemed to be spinning and whirling her way through effortlessly. "Hikigaya, Momo-chan! Have either of you guys played before?" Ashido Mina asked as the song finished, the fact that her bubblegum-pink skin looked slightly flushed with exertion the only indication that she had even needed to sweat to take down Bakugo.

I shook my head, looking out of the corner of my eye to see that Yaoyorozu was shaking hers as well. "Nope," I said.

"That's perfect, then!" Ashido said, clapping her hands together once in excitement. "Since you guys are both newbies, you can go up and do an easy song together!"

"I'll have to sit this one out," I said with false reluctance in my voice. "Recovery Girl said no unnecessary exercise until my weight comes back up."

Ashido rolled her eyes. "Please, Beginner Mode barely even counts as exercise."

I just smiled and shook my head, taking a seat on a convenient nearby bench.

With a pout, Ashido crossed her arms disapprovingly. "Look, I'll prove it! Momo-chan, do you want to do a few songs with me? We can do different difficulties on the same song, and Hikigaya can see for himself how easy it is."

"Sure thing, Mina-chan," Yaoyorozu said with a gentle smile.

Out of breath, Bakugo sat heavily on the bench next to me. "Goddamn," he panted. "I'm pretty good at rhythm games, but she's a fucking freak." He picked up a water bottle that he had bought earlier and drained half of it in a single long swig.

As the next song started, with Yaoyorozu clumsily trying to step in time to the beat on beginner mode and Ashido not only jumping around without missing a single beat but adding in the choreographed arm waves, squats, and shoulder shakes for bonus points, I saw what he meant. "Duly noted," I replied. For a few seconds, we just sat like that without saying anything. Unfortunately, after that length of time, it started to feel increasingly like we were just sitting there watching our attractive classmates dance, and I coughed to clear my throat before turning to Bakugo. "So, uh, do you come to this arcade often, Bakugo? What else is good here?"

He looked at me, his face inscrutable. Finally, his narrow red eyes narrowed, and he huffed out a sigh. "Fuckin -" He bit himself off. As I recoiled a little bit from the sudden display of frustration, he looked me in the eyes. "Yo, I know you're awkward as shit with names, but you really should just get the fuck over it already."

My jaw dropped, but after a few moments I recollected myself. "Then… Katsuki, then?" I half-asked, half-apologized.

"Fuckin' finally, Hachiman." he grumbled. "I was getting sick of being formal with you, your last name is a fucking mouthful."

It was by no means the first time that someone had commented on my last name; most people assumed by the kanji used that it should be pronounced Hikitani, and Bakugo - Katsuki, that is, was by no means the first to call it unwieldy. Maybe it was because I was already used to Katsuki's crassness, but for some reason his saying it didn't sting as badly as it normally did. "If I'd known my parents had such shitty naming sense, I would have gotten different ones," I snarked.

Katsuki rolled his eyes at the joke, but he laughed anyways. "Anyway, yeah, there's some good shit here," Katsuki said, pointing off in various directions and listing titles. Unsurprisingly, his recommendations tended towards the ultra-violent and uber-competitive, ranging from Savate Savage (another fighter in the same genre as Fatal Strife, but more martial-arts oriented and less wacky) on one end to Beat Boxer (a combination rhythm/punching game) on the other. Nevertheless, the list was long enough that he was still going by the time that Ashido and Yaoyorozu stepped down from the arcade machine.

"See?" Ashido asked. "You can totally do Hero Dance on Beginner. It'll be fine!"

Yaoyorozu nodded earnestly, smiling and looking chipper. "You should give it a try, Hikigaya! It's a lot more fun than I expected."

I hadn't been paying attention. Or rather, I had, but I hadn't really been thinking much about the difficulty level at the time. I turned to Bakugo, hoping that he would provide some cover against the peer pressure and puppy eyes, but he just snorted derisively. "Suck it up, wimp," he said, slapping me in the arm. "You need at least fifteen minutes for aerobic exercise to count."

I stood, sighed, and accepted my fate.

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

Ashido had been right, of course; beginner difficulty on Dance Hero was almost insultingly easy. I almost wished I had tried it on Medium… just so it would have been less boring, naturally. In any case, by the time I finished appeasing Ashido, the group had reconvened over by the bench where Katsuki and I had been sitting. "So, I don't think there's any doubt that Mina had the highest score," Kirishima said, looking at Ashido with a mildly awestruck look on his face. In response, Ashido grinned and stuck out two fingers in a V-for-victory pose. "So, Mina, what should we do next?"

Ashido put one finger to her lips thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. "Hmm, well, I do have a few other favorites, but Yui-chan let me pick when she was the winner, so… Yui-chan, what do you want to do?"

Yuigahama blinked, startled at having been put on the spot. "Oh! Ummm…" She looked around for a bit, clearly overwhelmed at the wide array of choices available, before her gaze stopped at the back of the building. "You know, we haven't been upstairs yet," she said. "What's up there?"

Katsuki shrugged, his hands in his pants pockets. "A bunch of crap," he said. "It's where they keep the other arcade shit that isn't just games."

Kirishima nodded enthusiastically. "It's where all the games where you can win tickets are," he said, "they have a counter where you can trade them in for prizes and stuff."

Katsuki snorted derisively. "I think you mean you can trade them in for lame, overpriced crap," he retorted.

"Well I think it sounds fun!" Yuigahama said, staring at Katsuki as if daring him to challenge her. "And I'm the one picking, so I say we're going."

Katsuki groaned, but nevertheless followed along with the rest of us as we made our way upstairs.

The second floor was slightly quieter, in that the assorted claw machines, coin-pushers, pinball machines, light-stoppers, skee-ball tables, miniature basketball hoops, and other arcade games mostly didn't have music of their own constantly playing to attempt to drown out the pulsing riffs of the house music. The sheer variety of machines on display was fantastic, although... "I think it might be difficult to continue our competition unless we pick a specific type of machine," Yukinoshita observed, voicing aloud what I had only just realized. "Which one would you like to go for, Yui-chan? Skee-ball? Basketball?"

Yui made a show of thinking for a second, but poorly hidden on her face was an expression of a kid in a candy store, wanting to try everything. "Kirishima, you said the machines here gave out tickets, right?" I asked.

Kirishima nodded. His gel-spiked red hair was starting to droop a little from the humidity of the air outside and the sweat he'd worked up dancing, but his expression was still just as chipper and upbeat as usual. "Yeah, man. The counter for trading them in is right here next to the stairs," he said, pointing at a shop-like area to our right.

"So why don't we see who can get the most tickets in, I dunno, ten minutes? Fifteen?" I suggested innocently.

"Heh. You're on," Katsuki said, looking speculatively at the basketball machines.

"Okay!" Yuigahama shouted, clearly excited about getting the ability to go and explore. "So, let's all set timers on our phones, and we'll meet back here in fifteen minutes!"

Amid the chorus of agreement, I managed to hide my smirk through everyone setting their phones, but as soon as we all split up it stole its way across my face. Most arcade machines these days were Quirk-tampering resistant at the very least, but if my suspicions were right, 1/108th of the Telekinesis quirk I'd copied from 1-B would be enough to skew the odds in my favor, and I was looking forward to trying it.

But after one or two machines where I proved that yes, it was definitely possible for me to cheat without getting caught, I stopped. What was even the point? There was nothing I wanted out of the tacky gift shop, I didn't really feel like picking the next game, and… doing it felt kind of cheap. Dirty. I was supposed to be a hero, right? Shamefacedly, I shoved the tickets into my pocket and deliberately lost a game or two on purpose at the nearest machine, just so I could even up the score, then started ambling slowly back towards the designated meeting point.

To my surprise, I ran into Yuigahama a few rows away from the meeting point, staring intently at a machine that gave no tickets at all. "Did you give up on the competition?" I asked her.

"Wha?" She startled, before turning to look at me and lighting up in a smile. "Oh! Hikki!" She clasped her hands together, looking bashful. "Uhm… I didn't mean to, exactly? I was just kind of walking by and looking for a better machine than the last one I tried, and then I saw the claw machines, and I kinda got distracted, hehe."

I looked at the machine she was standing in front of. I didn't know what I had been expecting - something sort of girly, maybe? - but instead it was a machine full of hero kitsch plushies. Roughly half were super-deformed plushies of All Might, of course, with the rest mainly being similarly chibified dolls of other heroes in the Top 10. "So, which one are you going for?" I asked.

"I'll show you!" Yuigahama said excitedly. She swiped her game-card on the machine, then proceeded to carefully navigate the claw towards the mid-back of the box. The claw dropped slowly, eventually coming to rest on a plushie of…

"Gang Orca?" I muttered in surprise.

Sadly, her aim had been off; the jaws of the claw caught loosely around the doll's arm for a second as they lifted, but couldn't get it up into the air. Yuigahama whined in disappointment for a second before turning back to me. "Uh huh!" She said. "He's been my favorite ever since I was a little kid. My dad and I used to go see the aquarium every year on my birthday."

Her face fell a little bit as she said it; she never stopped smiling, but the cheer drained out of the smile, leaving behind a fond sadness. "Used to?" I asked without thinking about it.

I regretted it immediately, as Yuigahama's smile vanished entirely. She stood, her right arm grabbing her left at the elbow in a way that radiated vulnerability. "He died of a heart attack five years ago," she said.

"Oh." I said back, wishing that the earth would suddenly swallow me whole.

Bravely, Yuigahama forced a smile. "Anyway, my birthday's coming up in a few weeks, and I was thinking about trying to get a plushie for the occasion. I dunno yet whether I would leave it on his gravestone, or maybe just keep it around to remember him, but…" She shook her head, once again putting on a mask of false cheer. "Yeah! So, I'm gonna give it another try!"

I didn't have any words. Nothing I could think to say seemed adequate, as Yuigahama turned back to the machine, once again trying for the Gang Orca plushie. Again, the claw came back empty. In silence, I watched as she tried, and failed, a third time - but before she could go for a fourth, our pockets started to buzz and chirp, letting us know that our time was up and that we had to get back to the group. As she turned and once again smiled at me, trying to look like nothing was wrong, I finally found my voice. "Mind if I give it a go?" I asked.

"Oh! Um, sure, I guess that's fine," Yuigahama said. "I'm sure everyone won't mind if we're just a little late."

As I turned and bent over the crane machine, preparing to make my attempt, I saw Yuigahama's face in the reflection of the glass. Freed from the need to keep up appearances by my seeming inattention, her smile was gone, replaced with an expression that looked uncomfortably like hope. To distract myself from looking at her face, I checked the price on the machine's card reader. Each attempt at the claw machine cost two hundred yen, which meant that Yuigahama had already sunk eight hundred yen into the machine with nothing to show for it. The addition of my swipe would bring the payment to an even thousand yen, which sounded like a fair price for a cheap plushie to me. So I didn't let guilt bother me at all as I used Telekinesis to make sure that Gang Orca was hooked by the claw, lifted free of the fishtank full of All Mights and safely set free into the wild.

"You did it Hikki!" Yuigahama shouted with excitement as I bent down to pick up the plushie in question from the machine's prize slot. I turned and handed it to her, and immediately she hugged it to her chest, squishing it tightly with both arms.

"I just got lucky," I lied. "You probably would have gotten it on your next try." Actually, why hadn't I just used Telekinesis to help her out without getting myself involved? Then Yuigahama wouldn't be looking at me with shining eyes full of undeserved gratitude.

As I uncomfortably met those eyes full of unshed tears, Yuigahama stopped squeezing the Gang Orca doll, letting him hang by her side in one hand. Then she stepped towards me, her arms coming up from her sides - and just as I was bracing myself to receive my first ever hug from a non-family member, her arms kept rising as she waved with both hands towards someone behind me. "We're over here!" She shouted. "Be right there!"

As I followed behind Yuigahama Yui, my heart still beating fast enough that Recovery Girl would probably yell at me for getting too much cardiovascular exercise, I couldn't decide whether I was relieved or disappointed.

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

As I almost expected, when we all got back together and the tickets were tallied, Yukinoshita Yukino was in first place. Katsuki coming in a very close second place wasn't a surprise either, though it looked like it was to him. "Fuck! The payouts on the basketball hoops in this place are bullshit," he complained.

Yukinoshita smirked. "You know, Bakugo, it seems like every time you lose, it's always the machine's fault, or the payouts, or 'bad luck'. Have you ever considered the notion of taking responsibility for your own failures?"

Katsuki's eyes widened, then narrowed. His hands erupted in fire and smoke for a second, which got him a dirty look from the arcade attendant behind the ticket counter. It might have been more than a dirty look, had Katsuki not just dramatically ruined the prize tickets he was holding. "That's it," he snarled. "Pick a machine, Ice Queen. You and me, head to head. We'll see who the failure is."

"Oh boy," I muttered, sharing a long-suffering glance with Yuigahama.

Yukinoshita turned and searched the room, smirking with the satisfaction of having gotten one over on Katsuki. "There," she said, her finger stabbing out at an air hockey table. "Unless you're afraid of another competition in real life instead of in a computer, that is."

"Ooh, I love air hockey!" Mina said excitedly, before her face fell. "Oh, but there's only one table. I guess the rest of us will have to find something else, maybe? I kinda don't want to split up again, though."

Saika looked at the table thoughtfully for a second, before hitting his fist into his open palm. "Hey, I know!" He said, "we could play a two versus two match, and then everybody who isn't in the air hockey game can play a two versus two game of foosball right next to it." He took another look at the sparks flying in the air between Yukinoshita and Katsuki, and coughed hurriedly. "Um, does somebody want to be on a team with me for foosball?" he asked bashfully, his hands fidgeting nervously behind his back.

Unfortunately for me, the sheer cuteness factor of Saika asking the question distracted me for the few fractions of a second it took Yuigahama to decide she didn't want to get anywhere in between Yukinoshita and Katsuki either. "I will, Sai-chan!" Yuigahama piped up as she ran over and threw her arm around his shoulders in a friendly fashion. Yeah, that was just the kind of girl Yuigahama Yui was; someone who gave out hugs without thinking about it - never mind that she'd never actually finished giving me one in the first place.

Still, there was a chance for me to form the second team, as long as I - "Hikigaya," Yukinoshita Yukino said, derailing my train of thought before it could finish leaving the station. "Would you like to join me in showing Bakugo his place?" She asked.

I was torn. On the one hand, going up against Katsuki was an exercise in frustration, win or lose. On the other hand, joining the Foosball game now would mean going up against the combined puppy-dog eye power of Yuigahama and Saika. And on the third hand, Yukinoshita asking me to team up with her was effectively the same thing as someone picking me first for their team in gym class. For novelty's sake alone, rejecting such an offer was impossible. "Sure," I said with a shrug.

I looked over at Katsuki nervously, hoping that he wouldn't take offense at me deciding to help Yukinoshita, but if anything he just looked more excited. "Hell yeah, about time we had another rematch! I'll take you both on!" His gaze scanned everyone else who hadn't picked a game to play, then stopped. "Yo, Spiky Ha- ah, fuck it. Kirishima. You in?"

Kirishima's eyes widened. With a happy grin, he flexed one arm enthusiastically. "Just leave the defense to me!"

My eyes met Yukinoshita's. "You take the left half, I'll take the right?" I offered.

"Acceptable," She said, flexing her fingers in a reverse bridge to loosen them up before she grabbed whatever you called the round thingy you used to smack the puck around with. "Just make sure to hold up your end."

"I guess that leaves you and me for foosball, Mina-chan," Yaoyorozu said.

"Yup!" Ashido said. "Have you played before?"

"Well, we actually have a table in our house, so I more or less know how it works, but I haven't had too many people to play against very often…" As Yaoyorozu's voice was slowly swallowed by the thumping background music, I turned to face Katsuki and Kirishima. The table itself was solid-looking, a large construction with chromed steel edges and a jet-black board, meant to look like the pucks were floating on a lightless plain. LEDs inside the pucks and around the edges of the board made the pucks look like they were made out of solid light. The only flaw in the illusion was the hundreds of scratches that years of excited play had carved into the board, but I didn't really mind them; rather than something pristine, I sort of liked the sense of history it gave the board.

"You got any bullshit rules you want to whine about, do it now instead of bitching about it later," Katsuki demanded.

Yukinoshita's eyes hardened. "I'm sure that however the machine counts the score will be fine," she said.

Hurriedly, I spoke up. "Aside from that, everyone keeps their hands on their own side of the board, if anybody hits the puck so hard that it goes flying it's their job to go get it, and no touching the board or blocking the goal with anything but the, uh… whatever you call these things," I said, holding up the puck-whacker.

"Strikers, I think," Yukinoshita said absent-mindedly. "Also, while I do agree that those rules make sense, is there really a need to set them out explicitly? Even Bakugo isn't childish enough to block the puck with his hands."

"What the hell do you mean 'even', Ice Queen?" Katsuki growled.

Ignoring Bakugo's predictable complaints, I looked at Yukinoshita out of the corner of my eyes. "If you were ever an older sibling, you'd know."

"Oh yeah, that's right! I saw your sister when she stopped by with you after the Sports Festival," Kirishima said. "Is she really that much of a handful? She really didn't seem like the type."

I laughed hollowly. "That's what everyone says. She's incredibly cute, so cute that sometimes even I think, 'oh, my memories must be exaggerating. How could an angel like this be such an incredible pain in the neck?' So, I don't blame you for thinking that way, when sometimes even I forget. And then she uses her super-strength to 'accidentally' whack the puck so hard it goes flying across the room and tries to give you puppy dog eyes to go get it for her, and it's just like, 'right, now I remember.'"

Yukinoshita looked at me with scorn. "Can you not praise your sister so excessively even as you're badmouthing her?" She said sarcastically. "It's like a chef trying to use powdered sugar to cover up the taste of rotten fruit. It's nauseating."

"Spoken like a true little sister," I said smugly. "As a big brother, even if my sister is spoiled completely rotten, I can't help but think she's sweet."

"How about we quit talking about Hachiman's kid sister entirely, and start fucking playing the game?" Katsuki demanded. "If you don't get set up already, I'll just start without you and take the free points."

"Already admitting that the only way you could possibly beat us is by cheating?" Yukinoshita teased him, even as she grabbed a striker and got set up to my left.

Surprisingly, the first person to retort to her jibing wasn't Katsuki, but rather Kirishima. "Say that once you actually score a point on us," he said cockily. "It doesn't matter if it's in air hockey or as a hero, I'm a wall that nobody's going to sneak past!"

"Who needs to sneak?" I said. "All we have to do is hit it faster than you can react." Saying so, I swiped my card in the reader, causing the air to start blowing out from the bottom of the machine and for the puck return on our side of the machine to disgorge a glowing disc. "And speaking of fast reactions, looks like we're up first."

Katsuki snorted. "Cheap tricks don't mean shit when they're up against pure skill. You better get used to starting the play, because you're gonna be doing it every time we score." As I raised my eyebrows at him mockingly, he went back over what he just said and backpedaled. "That does not mean you get to use your quirk for cheap tricks, that's just cheating."

"Yeah, yeah," I said, rolling my eyes like I hadn't been considering just that.

Yukinoshita looked askance at me for a second, then bent down lower to the hockey table. "Alright, Bakugo. Let's see you put your money where your mouth is."

Air Hockey can be a surprisingly tense game. Pucks move quickly and at unexpected angles, sometimes before you can react. All the way through the match, the score stayed close. Compared to our opponent's front-and-back play, Yukinoshita and I attacking side-by-side had much better offense in exchange for lower defense, so the score tended to swing back and forth; Yukinoshita and I would get on a good scoring run for a little while and pull ahead, then be stonewalled for a while by Kirishima while Katsuki slowly dragged us down and even took back the lead. But frankly, Yukinoshita and I made too good of a team for Kirishima to keep us out forever. The only problem stopping us from completely dominating the match was the middle ground between us.

The first time Katsuki whipped the puck straight down the middle of the board at the goal, Yukinoshita and I both accidentally assumed the other person would block, and the two of us failed to catch the puck entirely. After that false start, though, we talked it out and agreed that we would both go for anything in the middle, making sure at least one of us could stop the puck. Katsuki, of course, kept aiming for it anyway.

"Dammit, quit doing that!" I shouted at him as I bumped Yukinoshita's shoulder for the third time of the night. I'd luckily managed to cushion the impact between the puck and my striker enough that it slowed down to a languid glide on our side of the board, bouncing it off the wall gently under my control. I straightened, and turned to look at Yukinoshita with a smile just as she stretched across the center of the board to try to grab her own shot.

Our eyes met. Her ice-blue irises were dancing in merriment, and the corners of her coral-pink lips were curled up in a playful smile, far closer to my face than I usually saw them. I couldn't help but flinch back, my heart suddenly racing. The moment passed after a second, and I did my best to return my focus to the game, but I couldn't help but be distracted by the simple fact that Yukinoshita Yukino was standing next to me. It was stupid, of course. A purely aesthetic attraction, compounded by loneliness into wild delusions. There was no reason to assume otherwise.

Ka-thunk-rattle. The sound of the puck rocketing into our goal snapped me out of my reverie, and was soon followed by Katsuki's belligerent shout of "Hell yeah!" As he and Kirishima traded high-fives, I turned towards Yukinoshita and sighed.

"Sorry," I said apologetically. "I was expecting another one of those shots down the middle and didn't react in time."

"It's alright," Yukinoshita said, a fierce look of focus on her face. "We can still turn it around."

I looked at the scoreboard. Seven points to nine, not in our favor, and victory was set at first to ten. "You have a plan?" I asked, leaning in a little bit closer to her to keep Katsuki and Kirishima from overhearing even as I reached for the puck return slot.

"We just need to put pressure on them," Yukinoshita said, leaning in as well. I couldn't help but swallow as her face got close to mine. "Let's go on an all-out offens-" She broke off suddenly, just as my brain stopped short-circuiting and registered that instead of a hockey puck, I had grabbed the cool skin of Yukinoshita Yukino's hand. Even as I realized it, I saw her eyes widen with shock as she came to the sudden realization herself that we had gotten way too close.

I jerked away like I'd been scalded, stammering "Sorry! Ah! My bad!" Yukinoshita herself looked shocked, having pulled away almost as fast as I had, the hand that had touched mine held by the wrist in her other hand and pulled to her chest. "I didn't realize you were already going for it."

"N-no, that's… all right," Yukinoshita stammered in reply. "I was distracted as well."

"Yeah, um, it's cool," I said, my face feeling hot. "Um, it's all yours."

"Yo, quit flirting and serve the damn puck already!" Katsuki shouted.

My head whipped towards him. "Stop saying we're flirting!" If I were still in middle school, maybe I would have left the ambiguity open, avoided denying the topic explicitly out of the forlorn hope that just maybe, the girl I was accused of having feelings for would notice how I felt and potentially reciprocate. But for the first time, I had a taste of actually having friends to hang out with. The last thing I wanted was to disgust Yukinoshita by making her think I had a crush on her and ruin the group atmosphere. "There's nothing like that going on," I said vehemently. "I was startled, that's all."

For a second, Yukinoshita's face was blank and unreadable, and then it slowly ramped up into righteous indignation "Exactly," Yukinoshita Yukino agreed. "I have no interest in flirting with Hikigaya. Are you an idiot?"

Ouch. I mean, I'd been expecting that sort of reaction from her, but hearing it out loud kind of stung. "Do you even know what actual flirting looks like?" I accused Katsuki. "Me tolerating Yukinoshita's terrible personality isn't exactly the height of romance, here."

Yukinoshita dropped the puck on the table, waiting only just long enough for me to get back before she sent it screaming towards the other half of the table. "Agreed; by now-" tak tak whack, the puck bounced off of the walls and Kirishima's striker before coming back to her to hit again, "- you should know me -" tak tak tak crack, her shot banked off the right wall, back wall, left wall, and then to me, only for me to send it straight at their goal "- well enough to realize -" whack whack whack, the puck bounced back and forth between Yukinoshita and Katsuki's strikers, until suddenly she shifted her hand just enough that the puck bounced sideways, ricocheting off the wall just in front of me. With a ker-crack I hit it in one smooth motion, sending it zig-zagging across the field and finally slipping in just behind Kirishima's guard. "That if I was going to flirt with someone, I would do it with someone actually presentable," Yukinoshita finished coolly. "Nice shot, Hikigaya."

"Thanks," I said dryly. "And I'm not surprised, you definitely seem like the type to go for vapid, shallow pretty-boys," I agreed with Yukinoshita sarcastically, eyeing her overly fussy and proper school uniform. "I'm sure there's got to be at least enough of them at the local School for the Deaf to host a mixer."

Yukinoshita evaluated me with an unamused glare. "I could say the same about the girls at the local School for the Blind, but I think they have better options."

Ka-thunk-rattle. Startled, I turned to the air hockey table, which was now flashing and blinking wildly as it announced that the Red Team had scored the tenth and final point. Katsuki was grinning at the two of us, looking more smug than I'd ever seen him, his eyes folded, while Kirishima was doubled over laughing, his hand on Katsuki's shoulder. "Ha ha ha ha - Bakugo you're such an asshole but that was fantastic!" He said between guffaws.

"Really?" Yukinoshita asked Katsuki in disgust.

"If you wanted a rule about no playing while the other team was distracted, you should have said so before we started!" Katsuki crowed.

"I suppose it's my own fault for not recognizing that you were completely unfamiliar with the concept of common courtesy," Yukinoshita said with an exasperated sigh, "but I find it awfully telling that for all that you were complaining about cheap tricks at the start of the match, you were quick enough to resort to them when it looked like you might lose at the end of it."

"Bitch, you had eight points," Katsuki said dismissively. "You never stood a chance. I was just putting you out of my misery."

Yukinoshita continued bickering with Katsuki, but I was distracted from listening to it by the sudden vibration of my phone. Concerned that it could be my parents - I'd texted Komachi to let her know I would be home late, but technically I'd hung out with friends without checking in with them first - or that it had gotten later than I'd realized and Komachi was wondering where I was, I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check it. The caller ID read "Cyberpunch Hero Agency." I dragged my thumb across the touchscreen to pick up the call so quickly I'm surprised the glass didn't catch fire. "Hello, Hikigaya Hachiman speaking," I said, my tongue practically tripping over itself in my haste to answer.

"Hey, kid." I hadn't heard Cyberpunch's voice in a few weeks, but it was instantly recognizable even over the pulsing background music of the arcade, a mature contralto with just a hint of roughness to it. "How's it going? Is this a good time?"

"Yeah, totally fine," I said, plugging my free ear with my finger to try to block out some of the sound of the arcade even as I attuned to Jiro's Earphone Jack quirk to hear better. As my friends started to look at me with concern, I waved them away with the fingers I had free. "What can I do for you, Cyberpunch-san?" I asked, pitching my voice loud enough that everyone else could hear it. I saw comprehension dawn on Yukinoshita's face, and she gently tugged Bakugo and Kirishima away so I could have a little privacy for the conversation.

"Are you sure?" Cyberpunch's voice asked. "It sounds like you're out somewhere noisy."

"Oh, yeah, some people from class wanted to stop at the arcade after the Sports Festival," I said nervously. "It's nothing important, really!"

"Good!" Cyberpunch's voice came through enthusiastically. "You deserve to be celebrating. You did way better than I expected," she said. I started getting nervous. Why was she buttering me up by exaggerating my accomplishments? Was it to soften the impact of having to let me down? "I know you're busy, Hikigaya, so I'll just make this quick. I'm calling because I wanted to make sure you got my internship offer."

Relief flooded through me. "Oh, yeah! I already signed it, Eraserhead-sensei said he'd be sending the confirmation to you tomorrow!"

"Oh, that's great!" Cyberpunch said. "Did he say why he was sending it tomorrow? A few people I know already got their confirmations from UA, so when I hadn't seen yours by the end of the day I thought I would call you to see if you had any questions or anything like that."

"Oh, uh, he said something about giving me time to change my mind?" I said uncertainly.

"Fucking - really, Aizawa?" My quirk-enhanced ear just barely picked up her mutter over the too-loud music.

"He, uh, wanted me to be sure about turning down Crust's offer, I think," I added in Aizawa-sensei's defense. "I'm totally sure, though, you should see it tomorrow."

There was a silence that stretched for a few seconds before she finally spoke up again. "Well, um, okay, that's great," she said. "I'll look forward to seeing you next week, then."

"Um, about that," I said. "I'm technically free a little earlier than that, if you need me. If you want me to stop by this weekend, or even tonight if you want me to, just let me know. It won't take me that long to get downtown from Makuhari."

Even over the too-loud bass of the arcade, I heard her sigh. "You shouldn't make offers like that, kid," Cyberpunch said. "That's a good way to wind up being taken advantage of. There'll be more than enough time for you to be a sad sack who never has any time to hang out with their friends after you go pro. Anyway, even if you're ready to start your internship right away, I'm not ready for you yet. I've still got some cleaning up to do around here to make room for you."

"Right, sorry," I said, cringing slightly. Of course she'd be too busy for something like that. "Then, I'll see you next week?"

"Hachimaaaaan!" I looked up suddenly to see Saika waving. "When you're done on the phone, we're going over to the photo booths to take pictures!"

Distracted by the angelic vision of loveliness calling me, I nearly missed Cyberpunch's reply. "Yup, see you next week, kid. So have fun with your friends and relax while you can. I want you well-rested before you come in, do you understand?"

My eyes tracked Saika's smiling face, and the cheerful faces of the rest of my friends behind him - faces who I'd been all too willing to disappoint by leaving suddenly. "Yeah," I said, suddenly feeling a little bit ashamed. "Thanks."