Sorry I missed yesterday! My days off keep getting switched :(

Suzume taps her pencil lightly against her thumbnail. The classroom feels strangely quiet with just her, Midoriya, Shouto, Katsuki, Ururaka, and Tsu present. Aizawa stands at the front, holding a small stack of papers. The class had been divided for the day, with most of the others sent to a study hall for the next two hours.

Meanwhile, the six of them will be running a practice drill, to help prepare them for the summer training camp. If they can pass the final exam and make it there, of course.

(Suzume doesn't tell anyone else that even if they fail they'll still be going to camp. They'll just miss all the fun parts)

Aizawa taps his papers on his desk. His dark eyes scan across the six of them.

"We'll be running this course multiple times with small groups from your class," he announces, his voice even and rough. She has the odd feeling that he spent a lot of time up last night.

Just so you know this will be much harder. This class will teach you how to decide between fighting villains, or protecting bystanderst. It's a skill everyone should know."

Ururaka and Midoriya cheer.

"We're playing heroes and villains!"

Suzume hums, eying her favorite teacher. Just what does he have in store for them?

He flashes red eyes at the rowdy pair, silencing them with a pair of squeaks.

Silence restored, he continues.

"You six will be dispatched to a scene of a crime. From there you'll have to determine whether the villain you find was actually at fault. Remember, many villains commit many different crimes, you can't make baseless assumptions. Decide whether a villain was at fault. Whether or not you should fight. We'll grade your ability to assess the situation, as well as how you defuse it."

"Now. Welcome your instructors."

The back door slams open and All Might bursts in in all his red and blue glory.

"I am here! Sneaking through the back like a villain!"

"All Might!"

"He's not the only one who'll be running this course," Aizawa cuts in before Midoriya can start fanboying too hard. "Cementoss, Midnight, and Present Mic will be assisting him. Be on your best behavior for your special instructors. Suit up and head to training ground Beta."

They all file out of the room to go change into their outfits. Uraraka bounces on her toes as they strip out of their uniforms and put on their hero gear. Suzume takes the longest, she has the most bells and whistles, but she's getting faster at getting in and out of it ever time she puts her suit on and takes it off. Hatsume thankfully make everything relatively foolproof in terms of her belt, boots, and vambraces.

"Man, what do you think this training will be like?" Ururaka asks, looking other at the two of them.

Tsu taps her lower lip.

"It's hard to say exactly. They weren't very specific about what we;ll be doing after all."

"Whatever it is, we'll be fine," Suzume says with certainty. "Let's go," she ushers the two other girls out and they fall into step with the boys. Shouto's new hero suit suits him much better than his weird white and ice first one, in her own personal opinion. He offers her the barest phantom of a smile.

Suzume, who is doing her best to kill his father('s reputation) inclines her head towards him and falls in between him and Bakugou, who looks like he's itching for a good fight.

"Alright. Finally we're learning something useful," he grins sharply.

Suzume gets the feeling that he's going to go off the rails immediately.

The stroll into the high building of Training Ground Beta, looking for trouble. It's not hard to spot.

"Hey look!" Ururaka points towards a building. "Cardboard police cut outs! That must be where the crime is taking place."

There's a small scuff of shoes and Aizawa stands behind them. It's hard for Suzume not to jump in surprise. The man is wickedly smart.

"I'll brief you on the situation," he announces. He inclines his head towards the building. "There's been a robbery at this jewelry shop."

"The employees and customers have been taken hostage. The number of villains and the number of bystanders is unknown. The police have called you, the heroes, in to assess and handle the situation. For this simulation, I won't be answering any questions of yours, or offering any advice. This is all up to you. Verify the situation and act accordingly."

The six of them stand up straighter, even Katsuki. Suzume has to keep reminding herself to use his first name, or he'll get weird and tetchy with her.

"Yes sir!"

"Let the capture training begin."

They turn towards the building.

Suzume feels the subtle shift in her perception. The sharpening of details, the brightening of collins, lines and patterns falling into place.

It feels like a cat sharpening its claws for a hunt.

She has to remind herself that it's all pretend, and that she needs to chill, and its not a real crime scene so what she would normally pick apart with a mental mania probably needs to be left alone.

"What should we start with?" Ururaka asks, tapping her fingers together nervously.

"Isn't is obvious?" Suzume chorus' with Katsuki. They stare at eachother and its hard to say who's more horrified.

Suzume clears her throat.

"We need to figure out how many people are inside," Katsuki ruffled his gauntleted hand through his spiky hair. "Pink cheeks, you go in."

Ururaka points to herself, startled.

"Me?"

He rolls his eyes.

If we all run in the villains will notice us. But you can float up to that window and not get caught."

"Oh! Right," Ururaka nods seriously.

Tsu taps her lower lip. "But isn't that dangerous? What if they notice you?"

Shouto hums.

"Maybe we could distract the villains from outside. Does anyone have their cell phone on them?"

Suzume lets them come up with a plan while she adjusts the setting on her goggles and lifted them up over her face. She's still getting used to some of them, but the heat signatures are easy to read.

Or they normally are.

The walls are thick, and the sun it bright on the windows, heating the glass. She can't get a good look.

Of course not, or else Tsu would have said something. She could see in infrared naturally.

Suzume tilts her head up, looking at the building and gauging the size of the air vents inside.

She syncs her phone to her goggles and turns to the others. Ururaka is getting ready to float herself up to the window to see inside.

"I'm going to get to the top of the building and go in through the air shafts. My goggles are connected to my phone, so you can text me with update and plans," she announces. "That way I'll already be inside in case something happens to the hostages."

"How are you going to get all the way up there?" Midoriya asks, craning his neck up to look at the roof top she's mentioned.

Suzume shoots him an odd look.

"I'll climb."

Suzume adjusts her gloves, slips over to the side of the jewelry store, and scales the wall. Her finger tips find cracks in the cement and ledges along the windows and her thin parkour shoes give her enough grip to lever herself up, up, up.

It may look like a pretty sheer wall, but there are small gaps where the pieces fit together and where cracks have formed over time. It's not hard for her to get up the side silently. The sound of her grapple, as small as it may be, might give her away to someone inside, and Ururaka needs to focus her quirk to get herself up to the window.

Once she reaches the roof, she gets a text from Shouto.

Shouto : three hostages and one villain. All Might is the villain

Suzume quietly pries off the vent of the air duct and slips inside. She slithers through them, quick and efficient while Shouto texts her additional information.

Explosions sound outside right as she reaches the ground floor. Katsuki got impatient, of course.

Suzume sighs, and nudges the vent open.

Apparently they're going to be fighting, huh?

She pushed the vent open to silence and steps out into something very, very familiar.

A murder scene.

Her classmates stand, stunned in the doorway, looking at the 'corpse' of All Might.

"He's dead? The villain was killed?"

Suzume ignored Ururaka's question. She's a little annoyed all her climbing was for nothing.

She circles All Mights still body. Her brain twitches to make connections. Murder weapon, blood splatter pattern, the smell of the air-

She wrinkles her nose and forces herself to turn away from All Might and look around.

"Corn syrup, really?" she asks.

"Corn syrup?" Shouto repeats.

She taps her nose. "That's what the fake blood is made of. You can smell it if you pay attention. Real blood smells more rust, and the older it gets the more… I dunno, sour it becomes? Dry blood doesn't have much of a smell, but if you get it wet again it'll smell like a cooked steak."

Ururaka and Midoriya look mildly horrified.

Shouto looks interested.

"Huh."

"Yeah. Also, real blood isn't as dark as this stuff, it all looks really fake."

"Maybe they're trying not to traumatize us?" Tsu suggests.

Suzume hums.

"Maybe… But the knife blade is also too short to have been used to kill this villain. See how the blood only goes halfway up it? The typical human sternum is only a couple centimeters thick with the muscles on his chest the knife should have penetrated way deeper than that to get to the heart."

Suzume scowled down at All Might, who has the decency to twitch beneath her glower.

"Maybe I'm overthinking it. This is just a training exercise…"

She shakes her head and steps back. So… He's supposed to have been murdered with this knife. Probably.

"Alright!" Katsuki spins to the three newly released hostages. "Which one of you killed him? Tell us already!"

Suzume scans the room. The bag of jewelry is still in place. One by one everyone pulls out their wallets to show the young heroes in training what's inside.

Suzume wrinkles her nose.

"Clearly he's not a very good robber if he lets them keep their wallets. They're full of cash and all sorts of other information. He's an amature."

And amateurs make a lot of mistakes.

"Why would he even need to be barricaded in the first place? An armed robber, you walk up, get the jewelry and walk back out. It shouldn't take longer than ten minutes, police response times in cities at this time of the day average at about thirteen minutes per call depending on the severity of the situation."

Suzume slowly lowers herself into a crouch above All Might, who's doing his level best to stay still and 'dead'.

"Which means that he took at least fifteen minutes. Then they called us…" From her place near the ground she has a slightly different perspective. She can see under the jewelry counters. The one missing most of its gems, and the one that held Cementoss, has a bright red button underneath it. A silent alarm.

So that was how the cops got called and he took too long to get out.

Unless.

He didn't.

Suzume tugs her glove again.

This was just practice and none of the puzzle pieces were fitting together the way they were supposed to. It was giving her a headache! She stands and turns to look at her companions, who are interrogating the hostages.

Midoriya is spinning some wild story about Midnight being in love with All Might and trying to get him to change the error of his ways. Which is silly because that's rarely what crime, especially robbery is about. But this is a highschool training exercise so…

"I can't tell what's just part of us playing pretend and what's supposed to be real," she complains. Her gaze wanders to each hostage in turn. Midnight and Present Mic have red marks on their wrists from the ropes. So the ropes were on them the entire time. Cementoss isn't made of normal flesh so nothing shows up on his skin, making it hard to tell. But if everyone was cooperating why kill All Might when the heroes burst onto the scene?

Unless.

No one did.

There's the softest clatter of glass diamonds in a sack and Suzume spins and lashes out on instinct.

All Might gives a very manly squeak and falls to the ground, his hands between his legs.

The bag of diamonds goes sprawling, and her teammates turn to gape at her.

"No one is a murderer, because he was never dead in the first place."

Katsuki gapes at her.

"What the fuck?!"

~ ~ ~

The sun is hot on her back.

Suzume hooks her thumbs in the belt of her suit. Her goggles hang around her neck and her dark hair is tied tight out of the way. Thismorning Chiasa had put a little braid in the crown of it and tucked that behind her ear. For luck she said.

Aizawa and all of the teachers stand in front of them at the training grounds. There's not a robot in sight.

"It's time to begin your practical exam," he announces, "As you all know, it's possible to fail it. If you do, you'll be left out of the summer training camp with the rest of your class. So don't make any stupid mistakes, kids."

"Why are all the teachers here?" Jiro asks, looking over the assembled crowd.

Aizawa considers her. His eyes wander to Suzume momentarily before skipping on to her other classmates.

"I expect many of you have gathered information and believe that you have some vague idea of what you'll be faced with today?"

"We're fighting those big ol' metal robots!" Kaminari grins sharply. Tiny sparks circle his head.

"Fireworks! S'mores! Here we come!" Mina throws her hands in the air and bounces.

Out of nowhere, Nezu pops out of Aizawa's scarf with his little paws up. Like Mina.

"This years tests will be completely different for various reasons!"

"Various reasons?" Midoriya repeats.

Suzume nearly rolls her eyes. Of course. No other classes have ever been attacked by a massive swarm of villains the way that theirs was.

"Well you see," Nezu explains patiently. "We've been worried about a villain revival. Of course we hope to prevent such a movement before it takes hold, but as a school we have to take all necessary precautions."

Snipe nods. "It's not unreasonable to imagine the counter villain battles in our current society will intensify considerably and your opponents will be unpredictable. That's why battling against robots ain't all that practical. To begin with, the robots were conceived as a means to avoid claims and suspicions that people were being harmed in the entrance exams."

Nezu picks up like they rehearsed this. Maybe they did.

"So from now on, you'll be fighting flesh and blood opponents. It is critical that our teaching simulates practical experience as closely as possible. So what does that mean for you? You students will be working together in pairs and your opponents will be none other than our esteemed UA Teachers. Isn't that fabulous?!"

"We're fighting the teachers?" Uraraka sqwuaks, horrified.

"Additionally, your partners and opponents have already been chosen. They were determined at my discretion based on various factors, including fighting style, grades, and interpersonal relationships." Aizawa's smile is downright nasty. "First, we have Yaoyorozu and Todoroki are a team. Against me. Then we have Midoriya paired with Bakugo and their opponent is…"

All Might slams down from the sky right behind them. "I am here, to fight! You're going to have to work together boys, if you want to win."

"Yusada and Kaminari versus Principal Nezu."

Suzume clicks her tongue. There's no way they're going to win. Kaminari has poor control of his quirk, and she's still more a detective than a hero. What's she going to do, give him a bad yelp review?

"Ten stages have been set in various training grounds. To complete the exam you'll have 30 minutes. In order to win your objective is to put these handcuffs on your teacher. Or you can pass if one of you manages to escape from the combat stage." Nezu finishes. "To make things more fair, all of your teachers will be wearing hyper density training weight, designed by one of the Support Course Students."

Hatsume.

Suzume would recognize her work anywhere. It doesn't hurt that she still wears the precursors for those very weights on her own wrists, ankles, and chest. She knows very well how heavy they are.

Given that the principal won't be fighting them hand to hand, it isn't much of a comfort at all.

"Well fuck a duck," Suzume says succinctly.

Kaminari slung an arm around her shoulder. "We got this."

"Look man. I'm not a stupid person. But we're about to get our shit wrecked."

If Suzume is honest she was expecting to be paired against Snipe or Midnight. Stealth and close range attacks don't work well against either of them. Snipe's homing would seak her out no matter what and keep her at a distance, while Midnights quirk would spread over a wide area and overwhelm her. It may work quicker on men than women, but Suzume knows from experience that she's not immune.

"Aw come on. Have a little faith in us! Suzume," he whines, hanging off her like a child.

Having him over at her house was a mistake. He's way too familiar with her now.

Suzume pats his head idly.

"Fine, we'll win or whatever."

Well. The worst case scenario is they lose, right?

They load up into a car with the principle in the front seat and head towards the industrial training grounds.

Suzume can't help tugging at her gloves over and over again.

"Hey, calm down," Kaminari pats her shoulder. "I told you, we'll be just fine. Even if we fail, the principle won't kill us ya know? We'll just miss the summer camp. Didn't you say you have your own summer training to go too anyways?"

Suzume sighs, and her shoulders drop.

"Of course he won't kill us. But we can't fail. I can't fail."

"Ouch."

Suzume wrinkles her nose.

"I didn't mean it like that. I just mean… I'm the first quirkless student in the entire school. In the entire country, to get this far. If I'm going to graduate and be acknowledge then I have to be at the top. Anything less and I'm just… a diversity hire at best. I have to work twice as hard to get half as far as the rest of you. So I can't fail. And… And I don't want to fail you, either."

She doesn't know why its so hard to get the words all out. But it is.

She's more anxious than she thought she was.

Kaminari shoots her an easy smile.

"We will be fine," he says emphatically.

God she hopes hes right.

The step out into the industrial section.

Nezu stands in front of them.

"The time limit is thirty minutes. Your objective is to either get these cuffs on me, or have one you escape from the stage."

" Kinda like our battle training. Can we really just run away?" Kaminari asks, surprised.

"Yes," Nezu smiles at the pair of them.

Suzume does not like the look of it.

Nezu counts down from three and as soon as he says one she launches a throwing disk at him.

He darts away, vanishing into the pipes.

They'll only have a few minutes.

"Run!" Suzume shouts, grabbing Kaminari and sprinting for the exit.

They only make it a block before buildings start coming down around them.

There's so much metal debris that Kaminari's quirk is all but useless.

Suzume swears a blue streak in the air, cursing her luck. She would have rather tried her luck with literally any other teacher than this one. She throws her disks at sounds in the shadows. Nezu could be anywhere. He's not there, but she keeps doing it every few blocks.

They race like rats caught in a trap, slowly being pushed further and further inwards. Away from all of the exist.

But.

To do all of this damage, that means that Nezu is going to have to be at the center of everything too.

Suzume scrambles up on shards of metal that bite into her gloves, threatening to tear into her skin. Kaminari struggles to come up behind her. She stops, ignoring his panting to listen. To smell. To taste.

Motor oil, metal, heat. Motor oil, metal, heat. It's all around them.

Something wooshes to their left and then the crashing starts against.

Suzume leaps down to the ground.

"This way!" She calls behind her.

Kaminari rushes to follow after.

"I'm coming!"

They get closer to the epicenter of everything.

Suzume holds up a small series of discs.

"I've been leaving a few of these everywhere we've been. They're smoke screens, and they all have remote detonation," she tells him quietly. "When I set these off we need to run for that tower. He won't see us coming. Can you electrify the entire building with enough shock to knock him out?"

Kaminari hesitates, eying the massive structure. Then, his jaw tightens and his shoulders drop.

He grins at her a second later.

"Leave it to me, partner."

Suzume nods, once.

She scrambles up onto a fallen building and starts running for one of the exits, alone. As if she'd abandoned her slower teammate.

Beams come flying at her and she throws a useless disk and changes direction, going for the east exist. Same result, then the south, and finally the west until she's been 'forced' to circle around and face the north exit again.

She touched a button on her belt.

The world explodes with smoke of all colors.

She can head Kaminari in the middle somewhere, but she doesn't wait. She bolts for the nearest exit, leaping from downed building to downed building as fast as she can. It's true, without kaminari she can move faster and climb higher.

But without Kaminari she would never go careening through the gates face first into the dirt while the half an hour timer goes off.

Whether Kaminari knocked out the principal or not, they won.

They passed.