The first match of the joint training between 1-A and 1-B began shortly after their teams were formed. Starting the session off on the 1-A side were Koda, Kaminari, Tsu and Kirishima. On the 1-B side were Jurota Shishida, whose Quirk made him look and act like a beast, Hiryu Rin, who seemed to use some kind of natural armour-projectile hybrid for his Quirk, Kosei Tsubarab, who he'd seen make constructs of solid air back at the sports festival, Shiozaki, who could use the vines that grew in place of her hair in a similar way that Izuku used Blackwhip. As their teams got ready, Izuku sat on the ground next to Ashido and Ochako, and pulled out his notebook and began some rudimentary observations of what was immediately obvious about their Quirks and his predictions for what exactly they could use them for. He scratched away on the page, noting down what he knew for certain and what he theorised the 1-B students may be able to do based on that.
"What are you doing, weirdo?" Togeike asked in her flat voice, standing behind him and looking down over his shoulder at his notes.
Izuku almost leapt right to his fight from the shock, but managed not to yelp in surprise or have his voice break at an unfortunate time. He looked up at her and saw that her eyes were narrowed at him, like they usually were, but there was an edge to them at that moment that told him he should choose his words carefully. Izuku fought off the embarrassment as he shifted around to look at her properly. He'd never had anyone peek at his notes before, not even his closest friends would simply look over his shoulder while he was in his own head, without asking. They knew how much it meant to him to have his private space to empty out his overflowing head, and they didn't intrude on that. Togeike apparently was not that kind of person.
"Uh, I like to take notes on hero stuff. Quirks, fighting styles, costume designs, support items. It helps me remember them later for when I'm thinking about those things for myself, and it lets me be the best version of myself. Learning from all these super cool heroes is one thing, but if I can know what makes them so cool, I can make at least some of that work for me, so I can make myself the best hero I can possibly be," Izuku said. He didn't feel comfortable meeting Togeike's eyes as they still honed in on the notebook, so he closed it with a snap, getting the attention of his other teammates sitting a few steps away. He didn't look at them, didn't ask them for help, but he didn't want to do this when nobody else was listening.
"That's kind of invasive. I figured some of you were trying to emulate what you saw on TV, but I didn't know you could just outright copy everyone else and get to be a hero. Seems a little bit like plagiarism of a kind, doesn't it?" Togeike said.
"I … don't know what you're talking about. How would it be plagiarism?" Izuku asked, looking up at Togeike with a furrowed brow. He really didn't know where she was going with this.
"Well, it's like you're saying that you know you can't do anything on your own, so you're just stealing everyone else's specialness and taking it all for yourself. It's selfish if you think about it," Togeike said. The thing that got to Izuku was that she wasn't smiling or even visibly enjoying insulting him. She was as stoic as ever, looking down on him with those cold eyes that seemed to see every little fault in him, even more than he did.
"Hey, what're you two talking about?" Ochako asked with a big smile. Izuku could see that there was something in her eyes that told him she knew, but wanted an explanation out of one of them. He could also see that Ashido had looked over and was looking at the scene before her with a confused expression on her face.
"Uh—" Izuku tried, but was cut off.
"You two know that he does this? It's creepy and sad, right?" Togeike asked, her mouth curling into the closest thing Izuku had seen to a smile from her yet.
"No," Ochako said slowly, like she'd been asked a trick question. "I mean, we know he takes notes, if that's what you mean, but … it's fine. Izuku's really smart and he sometimes has to write it all down to remember everything he thinks of. That's not bad."
Izuku blocked out Ashido's voice as she whispered, "Izuku, huh?" He only looked at Ochako, smiling gratefully as she looked at him and gave a similar smile, though her cheeks were maybe a little pinker than they normally were. He had to look away from her after a moment, because he felt eyes on the back of his head from over where he'd last seen Hitoshi. That guy needed to learn how to mind his own business.
"Huh. Alright," Togeike said, some of the edge leaving the look she sent Izuku. She sat down after that — not with them, she kept herself a few paces away — and turned her eyes to the screen.
Seeing Ochako's face, she looked like she wanted to say far more than she had to Togeike. She was almost going red. Izuku sighed softly, using Float to get himself an inch or so off the ground. He then used his free hand to push himself to the side, releasing himself from Float's hovering power and touching back down next to her. He'd started doing that a while ago around the dorm, moving without having to stand up, and it was an addictive shortcut. Katsuki said it was cheating, just like how he'd use Blackwhip to get the TV remote when nobody was looking, or to retrieve things just out of his reach when he didn't want to get up. All of his Quirks had little uses like that, and this was one of Float's. He touched back down and smiled.
"Are you okay?" he asked in a whisper.
"I don't like that girl. Did you do or say anything to get her talking like that?" Ashido said, cutting off whatever Ochako had been about to reply with.
"No, she just started on me. I guess writing in my notes is what got her going. I wasn't expecting it, but it's whatever," Izuku said with a shrug.
"No, it's not whatever. She can't talk to you like that. The next time she does, I'm gonna … I don't even know, but she shouldn't get away with that!" Ochako said, curling her hands into fists and holding them in her lap.
"I'm not worried about it," Izuku said, raising a placating hand to soothe Ochako's temper.
"Of courseyouaren't," Ashido said. "I could go a few rounds with her, though."
"Okay, that's too far," Izuku said to Ashido, frowning disapprovingly. "And it really is fine," he said to Ochako.
"Fine. I just don't like anyone talking that way, especially not to my friends," Ochako said, pouting in a way that was probably supposed to be moody or intimidating for Togeike, but just ended up looking cute.
"Okay. Thank you, though, for sticking up for me. You too, Ashido," Izuku said.
"No prob, Class Rep!" Ashido chirped while giving him a thumbs up.
"You really did turn around on me as Class Rep, though — what's up with that?" Izuku asked through a laugh.
"Ah, I never really wanted all that. It was a joke, more or less," she explained.
"More or less?" Izuku asked again, raising an eyebrow. All he got was a cheeky grin and a wink that told Izuku that he was never getting a real answer, which he could live with.
Izuku's eyes returned to the screen showing the rest of the students the fight currently ongoing inside Ground Gamma. It looked like he'd missed a good chunk of the fight due to what had just happened, with the two major strategies already underway on the screen. He sighed, but opened up his notebook again and clicked his pen a few times, trying to spot things on the screen.
He saw Tsu use their camouflage technique that they'd created during the class's training for the provisional hero licensing exam, drop kicking Shishida, who was in his beast form, in the head as they became visible. They then used their superior agility to avoid Shishida's brute force fighting style while getting in the occasional kick on a vulnerable spot, like the head or his joints. Eventually, Tsu led Shishida into a space more narrow than he could move around in, and he busted apart some of the pipes that had trapped him in, giving Tsu a bludgeoning weapon that they swung around with their tongue and slammed him on the head with, making a loud, reverberating sound that Izuku could feel in his bones, even through the cameras. Shishida fell to the ground and reverted to his normal form, defeated. Everyone not fighting back at the observation deck cheered, but Izuku thought he heard Hitoshi's voice a little louder than the others.
As intrigued as he was, Izuku had already written quite a bit about Tsu, so he focused more on Shishida, since he didn't know the boy as well as he did his friend. It seemed that Shishida's limitation was similar to Sato's, where his raw power came at the cost of higher brain function. He'd heard Shishida talk before, and he was a perfectly intelligent young man — if not more verbose than the average teenager — so it was painfully obvious that he wasn't firing on all cylinders when he was in his 'Beast Form'. His personality and manner of speaking had all but inverted, with the excitability and lack of focus catching Izuku's eye specifically. That could be manipulated in a battle, where his seemingly enhanced senses could be tricked. Izuku had deduced that he had at the very least enhanced hearing from the way he fought, which seemed to rely on instinct more than sight alone. Shishida often had near-misses while fighting Tsu, but the closer attempts to hit them were often the ones he threw while not actually looking at Tsu, but rather sending a seemingly random throw that was always accompanied by a tilting of Shishida's head, like he could hear where they were instead of see them. That could be taken advantage of by a Quirk that could create noises, like Jiro's, or with support items that could do the same, like Hitoshi's Persona Chords mask, which could throw his voice so it sounded like it was coming from someplace else. That was a good thing to keep in mind in the event they did this again and Izuku happened to be paired up against him. Shishida's strength looked like it could rival One for All at about ten percent, and that was dangerous to go up against. Izuku was up to around sixteen or seventeen percent nowadays, but Izuku didn't believe in being too cautious, or having too many tricks up his sleeve.
The rest of the fight ended up being a landslide victory. The rest of 1-A's team was already executing their plan. Kaminari used himself as bait for Shiozaki's vines. Since they didn't conduct his electricity and could subdue him easily, Shiozaki was one of the first to be targeted individually. Kaminari baited her out and Koda ordered a swarm of birds and insects to attack, leaving her open for Kirishima to slip through her defences and take her out in one solid hit. That was when Rin and Tsubaraba leapt into the fight, with Tsubaraba's Quirk trapping Kirishima in a cage of solid air and Rin firing off his scales as projectiles to get him to retreat. Unfortunately, that was when Tsu reappeared, pulling off the same trick they'd used on Shishida and getting Tsubaraba with a solid kick to the head. When he stumbled and nearly blacked out immediately, but hung on to consciousness with his sheer will, Tsu wrapped him up in their tongue and swung him around a bit, throwing him at a wall and taking him out of the fight properly. That was when Rin began to retreat, knowing that he was probably done for in a four-on-one battle. They caught up to him and beat him fairly easily, as Rin couldn't aim at four targets at once with his long range attacks and let Tsu and Kirishima — who'd escaped his air prison — into his guard, who both hit him at once and sent him flying.
Class 1-A won the first match of five with a complete victory. Izuku was surprised how the first half had almost entirely been planning and setup for the second half, which had sped by in a few short battles. It almost felt as though Izuku had blinked and then watched the entire 1-B team fall over like dominoes. He wrote down his thoughts about what he'd just seen, and figured that if all the matches were going to be over that fast, then they'd be done within an hour. Only about five minutes had elapsed before the match was over. He looked over and saw the fighters emerge from the arena and receive their evaluations, which they all took without complaint. Tsu got glowing praise from everyone who spoke, and Izuku couldn't help but agree. They had so many skills and abilities that he didn't think Tsu had a solid weakness, other than extreme temperature, which was a circumstantial thing most of the time. Not many Quirks could change their body temperature so severely that it actually threatened to shut them down — only Todoroki had ever managed that, by refusing to keep his ice in check back in the first term final exams. A round of applause was had for both teams' efforts, and the second set of teams were escorted to their starting points.
As the second match was being set up, Izuku watched as Hitoshi went over and struck up a conversation with two people from 1-B, Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu and Juzo Honenuki. They both responded to him eagerly, being the sort that won't refuse to talk just because they were technically enemies for an afternoon. The talk lasted for a while, with Hitoshi seemingly fidgeting with his mask the whole time, but then Monoma noticed what was happening, and forbade his classmates from talking to 'Class A scum'. Hitoshi dropped it easily enough, walking away from the three of them with a gleam in his eye. Izuku wondered what he was doing, but didn't inquire for now, not wanting to spoil the surprise even for himself. Hitoshi used a lot of tricks when he fought, more than Izuku, and so when Hitoshi did something out of the ordinary for him, it was usually a sign that he was planning something stupid or impressive. It was often that Hitoshi's plans ended up in the impressive category, a little rarer that they were completely idiotic, but Izuku crossed his fingers that it was going to be the kind of plan that was both, as those were often the highlights of watching Hitoshi fight. The stupidly impressive plans were beautiful to Izuku, and he held out hope that he would pull out something crazy in his match, which would come after this second one.
The second match was more eventful than the first. On 1-A's side, Aoyama, Yaoyorozu, Hagakure and Tokoyami represented their class full of determination. 1-B sent out Kendo, Manga Fukidashi, who had a page of a comic for a head, Kinoko Komori, whose whole existence seemed to be mushroomed themed, and Shihai Kuroiro, whose entire body was matte black, except for his hair which was a similar stark white as Izuku's streaks. Izuku searched his mind for what he knew about the 1-B fighters, except for Kendo, since they had spoken plenty throughout the year and Izuku already had extensive notes on her. They'd even arm-wrestled once, even if Izuku had lost on purpose to avoid going overboard due to the unreliable control over One for All's strength he'd had at the time. Kendo had told him about some of her classmates, though, and he already had the basic descriptions of some of their Quirks written down, and he flipped to those pages as he watched the teams get ready. He prepared himself to write down all the new thoughts he'd inevitably have, and waited with anticipation for the starting horn to sound.
As soon as the match began, the 1-A team did something that Izuku never would have expected in his wildest dreams. Hagakure, visible through her own power now, walked up to Tokoyami and touched her hands to either side of his head. They both stood there for a while, but nothing happened — that is, until he vanished completely. Izuku felt his breath catch in his throat as he realised what had happened. She'd made him invisible! Izuku immediately began writing down what he saw, a grin on his face as he considered the possibilities.
He'd thought a lot about how Dark Shadow was one of the strongest Quirks in their class, that it was only limited by the natural cycle of day and night. Tokoyami would probably be best suited for a role like Aizawa's, a stealthy nighttime hero. With the increase in power in the dark came a decrease in obedience from Dark Shadow, though, and so that could prove troublesome — if Tokoyami and Dark Shadow hadn't been working on just that with their near-symbiotic relationship nowadays. Because Tokoyami had lost the use of his eyes during their final exam last term due to a particularly potent attack from Ashido's Quirk, he'd been leaning on Dark Shadow's eyes in place of his own, since that event had triggered a Quirk Awakening allowing them to use each others' senses. Now, Dark Shadow was out almost all day and Tokoyami was having an easier time controlling her even in the dark, too, because he was more used to their connection. Maybe he could overcome the one weakness they had one day and become unstoppable. Dark Shadow was near-unbeatable in the dark, but even then, there was still light at night because that's how people saw in the dark — there was always a small amount of light no matter what time of day it was. Even then, Dark Shadow was a monster in those conditions. What could Dark Shadow possibly turn into if given the ability to avoid light completely when invisible? Hagakure's Quirk warped light. It was how she was immune to Aoyama's Quirk and how she pulled off her light-based blinding attacks and invisibility. If she could make it so that Dark Shadow was entirely exempt from being affected by light, then Tokoyami had just become unstoppable. Izuku wasn't sure anyoneUA student, let alone any of the first years present, could stop that kind of powerhouse.
A roar reached all the way to the observation deck, an echo being created from the noise picked up by the cameras and the actual sound travelling all the way to the rest of the students and their teachers. Izuku felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and wondered if the 1-B team could beat Dark Shadow in a lightless form. The only power type they had to Izuku's knowledge was Kendo, and she wasn't exactly on par with the likes of Dark Shadow. She'd admitted that she relied on skill more than brute force, and so that didn't instil confidence in Izuku that she could take him on at all, much less beat him. He stopped writing and watched, transfixed by the carnage unfolding on screen.
Every time a roar rang out from the arena, a piece of the environment was ripped to shreds by a massive, invisible force. Whole sections of piping and infrastructure, torn apart in one blow of unimaginable strength. Entire segments of the arena began to crumble, and Izuku could see that the 1-B team could feel it, too. They were looking around, trying to pinpoint the source of the rumbling in the ground that reached even the observation area. Soon, the beast was upon them, and a ripple of force shattered the metal plating of the ground and threw the 1-B team around like pebbles. Komori, a small girl that seemed to focus more on utility than power, was knocked out immediately. Fukidashi tried to get in a word, since his Quirk could manifest different effects from certain words, but he couldn't have a chance to speak before something unseen crashed into him and threw him into a series of pipes, knocking him out. Kendo and Kuroiro tried their best to team up and retreat, but it was then that Aoyama and Yaoyorozu appeared, having sneaked around behind the 1-B team while Dark Shadow rampaged. Aoyama cut off Kuroiro's escape routes by firing off his Navel Laser in all directions, since his Quirk let him inhabit and travel through black things like shadows and Aoyama's move made it so that he couldn't choose a consistent shadow to travel through. Yaoyorozu then conjured something that looked like a heavy set of handcuffs using her Quirk.
Yaoyorozu threw the handcuffs, which sank to the ground immediately as if they were heavier than the earth and missed Kendo's hands, which puffed up to their enlarged state and swatted them away. Kendo then went on the offensive, trying to land a solid hit on Yaoyorozu, one of which would be plenty to take her down with her enhanced strength. With Dark Shadow raging in the background, the four visible fighters went at it, the two duos trying their best to subdue the other. They were so invested in their own fighting that they didn't notice when Tokoyami and Dark Shadow became visible in one of the empty clearings he'd made in the piping and plating. Dark Shadow immediately shrank, returning to regular size and retreating back into Tokoyami's body. Tokoyami stumbled and shakily stood, before Hagakure became visible beside him to help him to his feet. They conversed for a moment, Hagakure patting Tokoyami on the back and guiding him over to a spot on the ground clear or debris for him to sit. Because Dark Shadow had retreated into him, Tokoyami was blind for the time being, and Izuku felt a pang of sympathy for him, knowing he hated being helped like that. Hagakure then ran off to join the fight, becoming invisible before she reached the battle.
Izuku tried hard to spot where she was, but it was no use. The thing that caught his eye next was the handcuffs, the shiny metal ones Yaoyorozu had made that looked like they weighed a thousand kilograms, disappeared. They weren't kicked aside by the fighting, because the battle had been moving slowly away from where they'd fallen to the ground and made a dent in the metal floor, but they just vanished, like Tokoyami had. Izuku realised that it must have been Hagakure picking them up and projecting invisibility onto them. If she could do it to people, she must have been able to do it to objects, too. It was amazing how Hagakure had managed to progress in the two terms she'd spent at UA, and Izuku couldn't wait to ask her about all the things she was doing to train her light refraction ability.
Kendo wasn't holding back at all against Yaoyorozu. Every time Yaoyorozu created a shield or barrier with her Quirk, Kendo ripped it apart or dented it so severely that it had to be discarded. Every time she conjured a weapon, Kendo destroyed it in one hit. Their brawl travelled across the battlefield until they eventually returned to where the fight had begun, back to where Izuku had last seen those handcuffs. Finally, it seemed like the vice representative of Class 1-A was slowing down, and Kendo clasped her hands together and raised them into the air for what would surely be a devastating blow if it connected. That kind of brutal double axe-handle was a wrestling move, outside of Kendo's wheelhouse of traditional martial arts, but she didn't look too concerned about that, as she looked down at Yaoyorozu's nearly defeated form with a vicious determination in her eyes. Izuku knew that he was likely stronger than Kendo, but that look did not make him confident that he could've faced her in that moment as Yaoyorozu did, looking up with a stoic expression that Izuku surely wouldn't have been able to manage.
Something changed, though, and Kendo's fierce look flashed into confusion and then anger. She toppled over as her feet were taken out from under her, stumbling to the ground with a shout. The handcuffs became visible as an unseen force pushed her hands down into the awaiting shackles. They clamped down on Kendo's wrists, and Hagakure appeared as she locked them around Kendo's arms. Her hands were pinned to the ground, as if they'd suddenly become too heavy when seconds ago she'd been capable of supporting their weight without issue. No, not the hands, Izuku realised. It was the handcuffs. They were ultra-dense so that they couldn't be lifted, and they'd lead Kendo into falling into them, since none of their remaining fighters could overpower her. Izuku guessed that Yaoyorozu had only managed to throw the handcuffs earlier with the momentum they retained from being ejected from her body, not from any actual upper-body strength. Yaoyorozu stumbled to her feet and smiled down at Kendo, her and Hagakure having been victorious.
Kuroiro paused in his skirmish with Aoyama to look down at his team's leader in shock, which got him a Navel Laser to the chest, which launch him off his feet and down to the ground, where Yaoyorozu met him with a net that looked like it had weights at each corner, pinning him like his teammate. That was the last of the 1-B team, which meant that Class 1-A won the second match as well, with an identical zero-to-four ratio.
Izuku cheered with his classmates, and looked around at all the excited faces. One face wasn't excited on the 1-A side, though — Togeike. He looked at her and took a moment to register her expression. It looked like she was shocked, scared and amused all at the same time. Those emotions didn't normally blend together, and it ruined the unaffected mask she tried to keep up. Izuku thought that Togeike would normally get a lot of compliments about her looks, but there was a dull dread on her face at that moment that aged her in a strange, unsettling way. She looked sick, almost. He knew it probably wouldn't get him anywhere, but he felt the urge to try reaching out to her at least one more time.
"Hey, Togeike, are you alright?" he asked, trying simultaneously to project his voice over to where she sat a couple of steps away and keep as quiet as possible so as to not alert anyone else. Somehow, Izuku thought she wouldn't appreciate him advertising what she was going through.
Togeike gave him an icy glare that told him he shouldn't have asked. At least he tried.
He turned his thoughts back to the matches. The fighters of the second match returned to the observation deck to get their feedback, and it was near unanimous praise for Yaoyorozu. Izuku was almost violent with how he wrote down what she explained, how it was her idea for Hagakure to use her newfound ability to affect visibility to test if the loophole she'd theorised about with Dark Shadow was a viable asset. She began to backtrack at a certain point, claiming in her own verbose way that it had been pure luck that her claim had been accurate and that she was simply testing a long shot crackpot theory, but Izuku added it down to his notes about Dark Shadow, that the Quirk could be used like that in case they needed a pure unstoppable force. Izuku did take note of how it seemingly drained Tokoyami completely to do that, so wrote that it may have been a last resort type of thing to take advantage of.
The participants of the second match returned to their classes with pride or shame. The third match's fighters entered the arena, some shaking with excitement. On 1-A's side, Hitoshi led with a sardonic grin that he showed off with his mask pulled down around his neck, Todoroki and Ojiro followed, giving Hitoshi wary looks, and Shoji trailed behind them looking like he always did, stoic and intimidating. Izuku knew that Shoji was one of the most soft-spoken and pacifistic of their class, second only to Koda in that respect, but his height and physique did have a way of putting people off. Izuku had always suspected that Shoji carried something with him, judging by the mask he always wore and the way he carried himself when around strangers. It wasn't his business, though, so Izuku didn't pry. On the 1-B side, Honenuki gathered his teammates, Tetsutetsu, Tsunotori and Sen Kaibara, and entered the arena shortly after the 1-A side. With both teams in place, the match began just a minute or so after that.
The third match was so quick it may as well have been decided before the fighters even went into the arena.
Immediately, two figures rushed out ahead of their teammates. Hitoshi struck out on his own and Tetsetetsu did the same, though Team-B didn't look pleased about it, whereas Team-A seemed to expect that development. Tetsutetsu raged forward with a justification that Izuku couldn't make out over the destruction he caused as he spoke. Hitoshi moved toward the sound of Tetsutetsu, who had begun rampaging similarly to how Tokoyami had in the previous round, breaking whole structures apart in his steel form carelessly. Hitoshi honed in on him and stealthily got behind the one man wrecking crew, fidgeting with his mask.
It then sounded like Honenuki spoke, and Tetsutetsu yelled back at him without looking, as he'd been doing the whole time. Tetsutetsu froze, brainwashed, and succumbed to Hitoshi's Quirk without a struggle. Izuku realised that when he'd been talking to Honenuki and Tetsutetsu, he'd been fidgeting with his mask to work out how to replicate their voices ahead of time for the match. He grinned at his friend's genius, and wondered why Hitoshi didn't show off this level of planning more often. Maybe he liked the image of a class clown type, or maybe he just preferred to keep his cards close to his chest, even hidden to his closest friends, but Izuku didn't truly care about the reasoning. He watched as Hitoshi ordered Tetsutetsu to walk, and escorted him back to the jail cell, where he locked the steel boy inside, undoing the brainwashing just in time for Tetsutetsu to understand what had happened before running off to rejoin his teammates again.
It looked like Hitoshi was working with the others to coordinate an ambush. Hitoshi really was taking after Aizawa more and more every day. It looked like Shoji worked to get Todoroki and Ojiro into positions where they could sneak attack the enemy from the shadows using his scouting ability, and the three of them positioned themselves around the 1-B team silently. Hitoshi returned to where he'd caught Tetsutetsu, where he could see the members of the enemy team wandering around trying to find their captured teammate, and in Tetsutetsu's own voice, called out to his teammates, asking if they could hear him better now that he'd stopped wrecking stuff. One responded, Honenuki, irritably but calmly calling out his classmate for his recklessness, and that had to have triggered one of Hitoshi's mocking grins when he thought something was particularly funny or ironic, but Izuku couldn't see it through the Persona Chords mask. On the camera showing the 1-B team, Honenuki went still and his eyes glossed over, and that sent the other two into a panic.
Kaibara along the line had learned to jostle the targets of Hitoshi's brainwashing to break them out of it, and attempted to do so before Todoroki appeared out of the shadows, sending a rush of ice angled so that it swept up Kaibara and Tsunotori without disturbing Honenuki. It was called mere minutes into the match. The battles had a time limit of twenty minutes, but the first match had been about ten minutes long, the second about five minutes, but this third match was over in three minutes flat. Izuku watched, astonished, as the third match in a row with 1-A as the winners passed with a landslide victory.
As the next match was Katsuki's team, Izuku felt safe tuning that out. He knew what would happen there. Even if Izuku wasn't too fond of all the posturing and attempts to make himself seem bigger and better than others, he could admit that most of Katsuki's confidence was earned. Izuku trusted him to win while he ignored the match in favour of planning with his own team. He closed his notebook and slid it into the pouch on his belt, which really was going to come in handy now that he had a way to store his notebooks on the go. He turned to Ochako and Ashido while the teams for the third match got their evaluations.
"I think we should plan. How about it?" Izuku asked.
"Yeah!" Ochako said, giving him a thumbs up.
"Absolutely!" Ashido said as she pumped her fist in the air excitedly.
Izuku turned to Togeike, getting the feeling that he probably shouldn't, and said, "We're going to be strategising, since we're up next. Do you want to join us?"
Togeike looked at him with a bitter scowl on her face, but sighed heavily. "Fine."
"Alright! Well, since we don't know you very well, do you mind telling us what your Quirk is?" Izuku asked, turning to sit so that there was a space for Togeike to occupy in their little huddled circle, which she scooted over to fill, even if she didn't look very thrilled to be close to them … or him.
"My Quirk is called Water Thorn," Togeike said slowly, like every word pained her. "I can make water into needles of ice, which I can fire off like spears. I can't make them from scratch, though, I need water to shape them from. I can make them pretty sharp, and I've launched some fast enough to shoot through steel. Other than that, it's nothing like that emo dude's ice power."
Izuku ignored the way she looked over at Todoroki, who was having a strained conversation with Yaoyorozu, and smiled. "That's awesome! Is that what the water tanks are for? That's a super smart support item to have, since you probably didn't know what kind of environment you'd be fighting in and natural access to water wasn't guaranteed. It'd be lucky if you could fight near a river, or pond, or a beach, but I guess an industrial nightmare is what we've got."
"Right. What can you all do, then?" Togeike asked. It looked like she'd gotten over whatever had kept her silent, but she still looked pale and sweaty, like she was nervous. Izuku could relate to that, so he didn't mention it.
Taking the looks from Ochako and Ashido, Izuku went first, trying his best to succinctly describe his powers. "My Quirk is Power Source. I have a well of energy in me that I can manifest in a bunch of different ways. Strength, speed, durability, binding tendrils, flight, obscuring mist, limited precognition, and probably more. That's the basic rundown."
"My Quirk's name is technically Zero Gravity, but it does a bunch more since I started experimenting with it. I can change how gravity works on a target if I touch it with all five fingers on one hand. No gravity, more gravity, directional stuff — I can do it all!" Ochako explained, demonstrating by making her helmet hover in the air briefly.
"Acid does what it sounds like it does. I can make acid that I can make as thick or acidic as I want. I can skate on it, wear it as armour and attack with it!" Ashido said. She showed off her power by letting a single drop of her acid fall from the tip of her finger and onto the floor below them, where a hole barely half a centimetre wide was melted into the metallic deck.
Togeike gave the three of them a look that Izuku couldn't decipher. He thought it was about the technical aspects of their Quirks. All three of their Quirks required some fine control to use, whereas Togeike's Water Thorn was more or less a point-and-shoot type of power, which wasn't a problem. Izuku realised in the back of his mind that she was probably intimidated by the displays of just how powerful and skillful the hero course students were, since this would be the first time she was seeing all of them go all out. She'd been behind a wall, which was an easy position to criticise from, but now she was getting a look behind the curtain, where it was much easier to see what really went on and much harder to make excuses. Izuku decided to forget about how she'd rallied her own classmates against the hero course just weeks ago and cut Togeike some slack. After all, they had a fight to get through.
Izuku was going to make sure they won.