After quite a while, here you go. Between this chapter and last chapter lies a chapter of another fate crossover, twelve SAT (along with a couple of ACT's) practice tests, and a flight delayed for three hours until it was completely canceled.
Hope you enjoy this… thingy
-SpiritOfErebus
…
School was just as boring as he imagined. What actually was the problem was authorship.
One would think that writing a light novel inspired by Counter Guardian Emiya and his story with trying but failing to kill his younger self, then finally returning to shoot an ancient babylonian king in the head before death would find a suitable audience.
However, he encountered one of his greater enemies, never before known to him: Cancel culture.
Because of the themes of irrational heroism and "high schooler suddenly awakens power", after the first couple sets of books were sold, it was canceled by the media as a bad influence.
It was also another reason for why he thought so badly of this government, and why he kept on sprouting socioeconomic theories about why the government was making heroism into a profitable business.
Instead of draining society through crime, the government was draining society by wasting money on hero merch and creating artificial conflict between the powerful and the oppressed.
Hans wondered if there was a society out there that would fight for these supposedly oppressed people but actually just commit more crimes for a megacorporation to actually take over the world.
Using a stupid front like "liberating quirk usage to end villiany and prejudice" or something.
Anyways, back to the topic at hand.
The business of webnovels was difficult. It relied on daily updates, and people tend to donate more if you post daily, or even more than once daily. Either that or you needed to post chapters of such incredible length as to give actual novels a run for their money, though that was a lot less popular because when you stopped updating that quickly, you would lose attention.
Hans was not a speedy author, however. Most of his experiences extended to short stories, so even writing light novels pushed his capabilities.
Still, for money, he would persevere.
Even if he was paid 1,500 yen per thousand words, cancer treatment for one year cost about twenty million yen, which was nearly double his father's salary. Since both his parents worked the same job and pulled about twenty seven million yen every year, the cancer treatment would leave them with seven million yen.
Along with school bills of 1.5 million yen just for UA, rent, living costs, amongst other costs for ease of life(namely coffee)...
Hans was going to have to pay for UA on his own, at least. Still, the numbers were neat enough between the tuition cost and money paid per thousand words.
He would have to write a hundred thousand words per year. While staying in school and doing well enough in school to warrant the scholarship that allowed him to keep the annual tuition at 1.5 million yen.
It was going to be difficult. It was even harder, considering the fact that he hadn't been taught the things that UA wanted to teach him. Thankfully, he knew English and Japanese well enough thanks to the other authors that resided in Chaldea, so during language classes, he was stealthily tapping away at his tablet.
Being pro heroes, his teachers obviously noticed the tapping.
"Already distracted during the third day of school, Listener?"
Hans looked up into the terrible hairstyle that Present Mic had.
"Aah!" he yelped, looking at the strange, pillar-like monster in the fibers. Oh, wait, it was only hair.
"Oh, it's just you, teacher." Hans said in English.
"Yes. Of course it's me, wait-"
Present Mic paused and listened to the unaccented English.
"How are you this good at English?"
"...Natural talent?" Hans shrugged nervously, making his tablet disappear behind his back. Behind him, Midoriya looked at where the construct was suspiciously before taking out a slightly burnt notebook.
"Now. Whether you're good at English or not, you still have to listen in class. Hand over your tablet." Present Mic said, looking at Hans as sternly as somebody wearing shoulder pants could.
"Of course I was listening." Hans lied, holding out his now empty hands. The little mermaid yawned and got out of his backpack, looked at the situation, and then began to giggle. A silent glare from Hans silenced it.
"...You were typing on something, right?" Present Mic said, slowly pacing around Hans.
"Of course not." Hans said quickly. Then, noticing that he had repeated dialogue headers, he winced. Doing stuff like that always showed a distracted author was writing that piece…
He was going to have to proofread his work.
"Well, what was the last grammar point I went over?"
Hans looked at the whiteboard and a Kaminari that was still frantically copying down the fourth sentence.
"We were talking about apostrophe usage, weren't we?" Hans said.
As Present Mic looked back at his own slides to make sure Hans was correct, he sat back down. His cheek rested on his hands as he thought of another way to keep getting words in.
His lunch break was going to have to be sacrificed. For the second time this year.
…He had been caught in Japanese class last time.
…
Hans's eyes glazed over the two thousand words he had gotten in. Fate/Grand Order was a hassle to write, but it at least had a story that dragged on, and it was one that required little to no brainstorming on his part. He had been there for most of the journey, anyways.
In front of him, an empty plate of veggie sticks sat, their crumbs slowly cooling. One half-eaten stick remained wedged in the little cup of ranch sauce that came with it.
"I knew you were distracted during English class." Yaoyorozu Momo said from behind him with a distinctly smug aura.
Hans shrugged. "Prove it."
The tablet disappeared once more, right in front of Yaoyorozu's eyes. Her eyebrows began to twitch.
"How could you… Such…"
"Now, the rich could never understand the struggles of the proletariat." In the distance, Uraraka nodded, pausing her conversation with a certain green-haired child and turning to look at the burgeoning debate, nibbling on a bit of mochi. Iida and Midoriya turned as well.
"You view my writing as a mere distraction? No! I'm working to pay for my own tuition." Hans said. "Unlike you, whose lunches are prepared by five star chefs, mine… is too, since Lunch Rush is a five star chef."
There was an awkward silence amongst the tables surrounding Hans's
"Wow." Kaminari whispered. "No wonder the food tastes so good."
"However, I have to work for every coin that passes through my fingertips. And you? You've probably just sold your furniture on ebay whenever you've needed money. That or asked daddy dearest for the monetary value of a small country, which would undoubtedly be given without a second thought. Such is the life of the rich."
Yaoyorozu's mouth opened and closed like a fish.
"Now, I don't enjoy constantly bantering with you." Hans turned, grinning. He really did enjoy annoying rich people. "But just know this. Every word here? Is worth 1.5 yen."
His tablet appeared and began to scroll on its own, showcasing all two thousand characters.
"What?" Uraraka yelped, tripping over several stools and benches. "Money? Where?"
Hans made his tablet disappear again and backed away, hugging himself protectively. Uraraka's neck creaked, before she turned her head unnaturally to stare at Hans, who could feel greed emanating from her shadow.
"Hans."
"Back, demon, back!" Hans reflexively yelped. He tried to run for the exit, but tripped over a bench. Uraraka's blank expression. His breath quickened, before he took another look and… relaxed.
This wasn't the worst he'd faced.
Faced with Hans's nonchalance, Uraraka suddenly stumbled and blushed.
"What was I doing?" she muttered.
Hans reached up and patted her on the shoulder. "Poverty hits hard. We should know. But this… really isn't worth your time. Building a fanbase takes time and way too much effort. Trust me, that's hell you're walking into."
"Wait! I understood that reference!" somebody yelled in the background. "What was the blue-haired kid's name again?"
"I think… Hans Andersen?"
"Actually?"
"...What's the big deal?"
"Isn't he that author guy?"
"The fairytale author? Like from the new Disney remakes?"
Hans's blood boiled. The thought of those horrid movies was almost enough to send the one who said that a glare the likes of which even Bakugo would have respected.
"No, the one who wrote Fate/Unlimited Blade Works."
"I might search him up later. That is a cool title."
"It's also weird how the red archer knows the name of the timeline he came from." Hans thought.
"So your brother's the Ingenium… and Hans is an author?" Izuku said, scratching his head.
Compared to those, being All Might's disciple was… actually still pretty impressive. Still, all of his classmates were ahead of him, either in heroics or real life.
He would have to work harder.
(If only he had actually tried working out before he was promised a quirk…)
…
"Is he here yet?"
"No, you idiot. Nobody's entered the classroom."
"His quirk could be invisibility!"
"No, somebody's already got that."
"…What if that is Hans?"
Hans immediately ducked behind a wall. He knew that saying what he did in UA would do something to expose his identity.
He thought back to the horror stories of internet authors getting kidnapped into little black rooms with nothing but computers, water, and bread, and were told to write their crappy harem slice of life stories.
…Now that he thought about it, those were probably lies. Nobody would want to read that kind of story that much. Then again, thinking about the stats on those stories, he was getting a little bit nervous.
Was he secretly writing in a community of degenerates? Then again, it wasn't really a secret. The degenerates had no intentions of hiding.
He looked at a clock that hung in the hallways. It was almost time for class to start. Still, the students had no intention of leaving. Hans hovered around the corner, debating on whether or not to just take the tardy marking to avoid this situation.
Just then, a terrible, yet beautiful voice echoed throughout the hallways. Accompanied by an explosion, somebody began to shout.
"Fuck off, you extras!"
Bakugo's catchphrase startled the crowd into slowly leaving.
"Who the hell does that guy think he is, calling us extras?" a slightly muscular student said. With red, pointy hair and weird red bands lacing down his arms, he was probably a hero course reject.
"Do you want to fight him, though?"
"I heard he was number one in the entrance exam…"
As the various students filed out into the hallways leading to their own classrooms, Hans ducked his head and slowly strolled to 1-A's door.
"…Det her kommer til at give mig en migrene inden året er omme."
"What did that kid say?" the passing students said, walking past their intended target.
"...Something about a migraine?"
"I don't know. I don't speak swedish."
Hans's eye twitched. It was Danish, damn it!
…
That day, they had a new class, it turns out.
"The new course you all have been enrolled in is called hero studies." Aizawa droned.
Hans looked at the schedule. Yes, he could read. He already knew that it was called hero studies.
"The classes will be two hours long. Pro Heroes like me will come to give a lecture on what heroism will be about. For that class, you will be doing…"
He got out a ream of paper and slammed it onto the desk in front of him.
"Paperwork."
An uncharacteristic grin graced Aizawa's face.
Everybody, even the impassive Todoroki, looked at the sizable stack of paperwork they were going to have to do in two hours and…
Expressed disbelief in various ways.
The ream of paper was split into five, before they were passed back. Yaoyorozu roughly tossed the stack of stapled sheets onto Hans's desk, knocking over some carefully arranged pencils.
Hans looked at the ponytail obscuring his vision and sighed. Despite the totally logical nature of his arguments, the girl in front of him still bore a certain hostility towards him. Maybe it was the cynical tone of all of his speeches…
He shrugged. He rolled down his sleeves, looked at his thin and eternally slightly burnt arms, then at the still-sizeable ream of paper in front of him, and took it with both of his hands. The paper felt freshly printed, still slightly warm, with the faint scent of ink drifting through the air.
Hans put the ream of paper down, and summoned the ice queen. Very, very cold ethereal hands slapped Hans on the head, as if scolding him for his laziness, before lifting the paper and handing it to Midoriya.
Midoriya looked at the slightly frosty paper, and then at Hans. Hans, feeling the gaze, turned and brought a finger up to his lips.
Midoriya looked incredibly nervous.
…
"Wait a minute…" Hans said, narrowing his eyes. "This is paperwork that Aizawa-sensei was supposed to fill out. Quirk information forms? Student profiles? Middle school test scores? If this were an anime, this class would probably be filler or just straight out cut from the storyboard."
"Truly, a mad banquet of darkness." Tokoyami muttered. However, nobody else deigned to complain about the mountain of forms to be signed and the future joint pain that they would experience.
"More like a lazy banquet of sleep deprivation." Hans muttered, preparing to just activate his version of "rapid casting" (which was just writing or typing really fast) and blitzing through the paperwork.
He already had borderline carpal tunnels. He really didn't want to do this… But looking at the mountain and mountains of paperwork, he sighed and activated his skills.
As Midoriya got out his notebook from behind Hans and started to chronicle his suddenly drastically increased writing speed, Hans's paperwork began to fly into the air and smoke slightly from the speed that the pen was dragged across the paper.
Bakugo looked up from his paperwork, looked at Hans's slightly blurring form, and gritted his teeth. His already rather sloppy handwriting grew almost illegible as he tried to compete with the servant skill. An impossible feat, but impressive in his attempt.
"Damn you… Aizawa sensei…" Hans muttered, looking at the pile of paperwork now slowly floating to the floor. Yaoyorozu turned and looked at his blurring hands with jealousy, looking down at her own, still rather large, paperwork pile.
"Tch…" Yaoyorozu growled, turning back to her own paperwork with a new ferocity. The little mermaid emerged from Hans's nape and floated down to the papers on the floor, picking them up and slowly stacking them on a safe corner of Hans's desk.
"I'm sure that this has some sort of deeper meaning, like the entrance exam!" Iida said enthusiastically, somehow not that bothered by the paperwork.
"Shut the fuck up. This is just Aizawa's damn busy work." Bakugo said, causing Iida to send an affronted look at the person in the back seat, before slowly zoning into a lecture.
"As heroes, we must take responsibility for our potential paperwork in the future-"
Kaminari's eyes drooped, before he began to drool on the stack in front of him. Clearly, Iida had a second quirk: inducing sleep. Maybe he was related to Midnight, though considering their very different temperament, probably not.
"-Additionally, even if the teacher does give us work to do, as students of this prestigious institution, we shouldn't complain about the nature of work-"
Bakugo's eyes began to twitch.
"Aizawa sensei is working hard enough to educate us, so we should reciprocate his efforts-"
Finally, Hans arrived at the last page. With shaking hands, he slowly brought a page of Aizawa's insurance contract up to his eyes.
He looked at the piles of messy paperwork that lay on his desk, and then at Aizawa sleeping at the front of the classroom.
Resolutely, he got a match out of nowhere. With a snap of his fingers, it caught light. Iida spotted the match and leapt out of his seat, knocking over Tokoyami's paperwork stack in his flying leap. Kaminari sat up mid-snore and looked at the flying Iida in surprise.
"Nooo!" he shouted. "Andersen-san, let go of the match!"
"Sure." Hans said, smiling.
Hans let the match go.
Surprisingly, Bakugo began to laugh as the page went up in flames.
…
Hans walked into the grocery store, hands still shaking and slightly swollen. He had been the only one to finish the forms that day. Most other people had to take them home to finish. The familiar smell of cheap bentos and strangely flavored snacks invaded his sense of smell, but he ignored it in favor of walking towards the minifridge. Opening up the glass cabinet, he reached for a chilly can of coffee.
As his fingers closed around the cheap little can of heaven, he sighed as his joint pain was slightly eased.
"You know, I could have just made some ice for you." the snow queen muttered in his mind.
"That's illegal." Hans said, drawing some strange glances. Hans turned, glared at a nervous kid trying to smuggle out gummy worms, and pointed at the shelf.
"Come on, dude." the kid moaned. "I was going to get away with it, too! My storage quirk can-"
"Yes. That's illegal, as well as stupid." Hans said.
As the kid was slowly swarmed by the store employees, Hans walked to the cashier and bought the can of coffee.
"Is it really healthy for a kid your age to keep chugging coffee?" The high schooler manning the counter said, leaning over the cash register to look at Hans's blue hair.
"I'm a high schooler." Hans said, slamming his student ID on the counter. Seeing the prominent "UA" symbol on the card, the high schooler shrank back and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Sorry, dude. Well, good luck on whatever you need that coffee for."
Hans took a deep breath, sighed…
And was immediately tackled by a movie poster. A hauntingly familiar face peeked up at him, Hans going momentarily stiff before starting to kick at the paper. The paper sprouted fangs, turning pitch black, before biting down on his sneakers.
Hans stood up and held up his foot.
"This isn't that threatening…" he said, thinking about why the hell he just saw Kiara's face in the demonic poster.
"It's probably one of those Harry Potter boggart scenarios… showing what we fear the most…"
Then, another chillingly familiar set of clothes jumped down from the top of the building, holding two equally familiar swords. With a hauntingly determined and chunni expression, the green-skinned man descended from the heavens and stabbed the sword into the pavement.
Hans looked at the Emiya cosplayer and sighed.
He knew that writing that novel would have consequences.
"Thanks for the help, I guess, cosplayer. The poster really wasn't threatening at all, though."
"No problem, citizen." the lizard Emiya cosplayer said.
Behind the cosplayer, another familiar figure rose. This time, wearing a red bandana and holding a jagged katana.
"There's somebody behind you." Hans said.
The lizard turned and looked Stain in the face. There was a pause, before the lizard threw his swords at the Hero Killer. The imitation of the married blades flew over Stain's head and stabbed into something that was in the dark alley behind Stain.
"What, is my visage so scary to you?" Stain said dramatically, unsheathing another katana. "For the perpetration of a society without heroes, vigilante… you must die."
Hans scoffed at the cheap attempt at seeming intimidating.
"I wasn't afraid of you." the lizard said. "Look behind you."
"Your cheap tricks won't fool me, you-"
"No, seriously, you idiot." Hans said, looking behind Stain and at a dark blob in the alleyway. "Look behind you."
Stain turned, and saw it.
Several severed movie posters swirled around what looked like a floating dress. The two swords that Spinner threw hadn't missed their target. They were stabbed straight into the hem of the dress.
With shuffling and rustling, the creature dragged itself out of the shadows. What was revealed by the light was the lower half of a little girl, made entirely out of growling movie posters gnashing their fangs together.
Creepy giggling echoed out in the street before the grocery store as it stood up. The blades fell to the ground, clattering loudly.
Hans scratched his head. Was this supposed to be a ripoff of Nursery Rhyme?
As the two vigilantes charged the ambiguous construct, Hans simply left.
"Shouldn't we help them?" the ice queen whispered.
"It's probably just some random villain." Hans shrugged. "The cosplayer and the idiot can handle that."
…
In the distance, Kiara frowned at the failed summoning of another servant."This is getting annoying."
And that wraps it up. Any criticism? Comments? There weren't that many roasts in this chapter, but you could just roast me by…
Joining the discord server or leaving a review!
Discord link: discord . gg / 9t9MK3jHmV
…Being an internet author is tough, you know? The statistics I put are actually real, surprisingly. 1500 yen sounds like a lot, but it's really just ten bucks or so.
Imagine being paid ten bucks for a thousand words. Granted, it is characters in japanese and thus a bit easier, but still…
It's mighty sad.
The next time you meet an internet author, consider tossing them a quarter or something if you actually enjoyed what they wrote. I don't have anything like that, so y'all don't have to bother :P
Unless…
…
Jokes aside, hope you enjoyed this chapter and I'll write more eventually!
-SpiritOfErebus