I would blame this chapter being a whole week late on my IRL commitments, but I got distracted with transcribing the entirety of Requiem of Silence to piano. Sorry about that.
But never mind that—here's part 1 of the Battle Trial arc.
Special thanks to Writermakeshift for beta-reading.
XVIII. My Storm, Part I
The overview of the combat training (which All Might had dubbed their battle trials) was pretty straightforward—they were going to be split up into ten two-person teams, and then take turns duking it out in one of the empty buildings in the area. One team would have to guard an objective (in this case, a fake nuclear warhead), while the other would have to capture it. Both teams also had the option to take out the other instead.
In all honesty, the whole thing sounded straight out of one of those old shooter games Subaru had dabbled in (something strike?), back in his day.
"And as for figuring out who goes into which team? Simple—it's all randomized!" All Might exclaimed, turning around and picking up one of the large boxes right behind him (the yellow one) and holding it out to the crowd ahead. "You just need to take one of these marked billiard balls—" Here, he reached in and pulled out a small, white ball and held it out to the class, where a clear letter 'G' was visible. "—and whoever you match with will be your partner. So who wants to be first?"
For a good few moments, there was nothing but silence throughout the crowd of students as not a single one of them seemed to move (well, Subaru would've, except he was standing off to the side near the back), but the sound of faint shuffling eventually permeated the air as Yaoyorozu Momo, who was standing at the front, slowly walked over to All Might, who was still holding the box out with that creepily-eternal grin of his.
Subaru and everyone else watched on as she reached in the box and pulled out a ball, before she held it out to All Might after taking a brief look at it.
"Team D! Very good, Yaoyorozu-shōjo," the man replied with a nod, before turning his gaze back towards the class. "Who's next?"
This time, Īda stepped forward and went up to him immediately, and then Ashido, followed by Ojiro Mashirao, until eventually every single one of the students had formed into a single-file line.
And from Subaru's place near the back (a couple spots behind Mineta, who was for some reason wearing a diaper, of all things), he simply waited for his turn and paid attention (while also slightly feeling bummed out) as almost all of the people he knew got paired off into their own groups, with even Mineta getting paired with a large, buff guy named Satō Rikidō.
When it was finally his turn, he stepped forward and reached his hand through the box, moving it through the near-empty space. And when he felt his hand brush against a hard object, he wrapped his fingers around it and pulled it out to reveal a blank, white ball that was the size of his palm. He then rotated it in his hand until a clear letter 'A' was fully visible, written in black permanent marker, which he held out to All Might.
"Oh, hey, you're with me!"
Subaru craned his neck at the sudden voice, and looked to see...nothing at all? The voice came from somewhere behind All Might, so—ah, wait, never mind—he finally noticed the floating gloves waving at him and the seemingly-possessed shoes moving towards him.
The girl with the invisibility Quirk, he realized. He did remember seeing P.E. clothes and a uniform that were floating yesterday and this morning, so this had to have been her.
"I'm Hagakure Tōru. Nice to meet you!"
"Midoriya Izuku," Subaru replied, giving her a smile and keeping his eyes trained on the central space a foot or two above Hagakure's hands (did this count as eye contact?).
But if she was entirely invisible except for her clothes, then didn't that mean...
"Ahem."
Oh. Whoops. He forgot he hadn't moved yet.
"Not that it isn't good to get to know your partner beforehand," All Might began. "But you're not exactly the last one in line, Midoriya-shōnen."
"You're right. Sorry, sensei," Subaru said, before turning around and dipping his head to the person who was behind. "Sorry...uh...Tokoyami, right?"
"It's fine," the bird-headed boy replied with a nod, and without any more hesitation, Subaru neatly moved to the side, allowing Tokoyami to finally walk forward and get placed into his own group.
"Let's go over there," Subaru then said to Hagakure, pointing to an empty spot next to where the other students were either mingling with their own partners, or keeping their attention towards All Might and the few people left in the line.
And for the next minute or so, the two of them silently watched as they all got placed into their groups, with Uraraka being the very last to go up, getting placed into group 'I' with Ojiro.
"Okay, that's everyone settled," All Might said, as he placed the yellow box down next to him, before he bent down slightly and simultaneously reached into the other two boxes (this time black and white) and pulled out two white balls identical to the ones all of the students were holding.
"And for our first matchup, we have...Team A versus Team D!"
Okay so it was him and Hagakure, going up against...
His eyebrows shot up when he realized just who exactly were the people who made up the opposing team, as he saw none other than Katsuki and Yaoyorozu step forward and make their way towards All Might.
Well, then. This was about to get really interesting, Subaru thought, as he met Katsuki's gaze and returned the other boy's grin with his own.
"Team D is going to be the defending villain team, and Team A will be the attacking hero team," All Might explained, before making a gesture to Subaru and the others to follow him. "You four, follow me. Everyone else, I'll meet you at the spectator's room."
Subaru and everyone responded with a resounding 'hai!', before the crowd behind them walked away towards the room near the mock city's entrance, while he, Hagakure, Katsuki, and Yaoyorozu followed All Might to wherever it was they were doing this exercise.
"Villain team, you have ten minutes to head up to the floor with the fake bomb and make a plan with your partner, and then the hero team can come in," All Might said, when they all stopped at an empty, almost skeletal kind-of building—it looked like there was nothing there but the concrete (and the fake bomb, he supposed). "Sound good to you?"
"Yeah."
"Yes, sensei."
All Might nodded. "Good." He opened the door to the building, and raised his hand to show the stopwatch he had been holding, his thumb hovering right over the button at the top. "Your five minutes start right when you walk through this door."
Katsuki shared a brief glance with Yaoyorozu for a moment before he motioned towards the door in a vague 'after you' motion. She gave him a curt nod in response, and started walking inside the building. He moved to follow behind her, but stopped right before the door and turned to give Izuku a two-fingered salute before he stepped inside.
He would wish Izuku luck, but...he wasn't the one who needed it, was he?
"Best of luck to all of you," he heard All Might say behind him, and turned to see the man closing the door. "And remember, Hero Team—you can't step into the building until the whole five minutes are…"
The door cut his voice off as it finally closed with a clear thud, but Katsuki still glanced behind to see if it was fully closed before he turned his attention towards his partner, who was looking back at him from the base of the stairs.
"Okay, real quick—" he began, as they started walking up the stairs. "—your Quirk is being able to make things from your body, right?"
"Yes," Yaoyorozu replied, looking back at him and nodding. "To be specific, my body uses any recently stored lipids as a fuel source to convert them into the objects I create, but they're dependent on how much of my exposed skin I have to work with."
Which explained why her costume looked like that, Katsuki realized, as he nodded in understanding. He wasn't really distracted by what she was wearing, unlike a lot of the other guys in the class (looking at you, Mineta), but even he wanted to know just why a girl would go around in public in what was basically a swimsuit.
"Your Quirk is generating explosions from your hands, right?" she then asked.
"With my sweat as the fuel, yeah." A beat of silence passed between the two of them as they continued walking up the stairs before Katsuki spoke again. "So what exactly can't you make?"
"Only anything I don't know the molecular makeup of, or takes up too much of my lipids." Yaoyorozu replied. "And I obviously won't create anything dangerous like the radioactive elements. I'd rather not risk giving both of us cancer on our second day in the hero course."
Katsuki snorted. "I wasn't gonna ask you anyway," he said, waving her off. As they reached the room containing the 'bomb' they were supposed to be guarding, he stopped moving and leaned against the wall next to the doorway with an audible exhale. Yaoyorozu turned back to look at him with slight confusion, but he paid her no attention as his thoughts turned to their competition.
Just how in the hell were they supposed to do this? Hagakure and her invisibility, they could probably reasonably work around, but with Izuku? All bets were off—all he really had to do on his end was just blitz through the entire building and put his hand on the prop bomb, and they had about eight minutes to make sure that didn't happen in the first ten seconds of their round.
(He was seriously regretting not asking for gauntlets full of nitroglycerin, right about now.)
Yeah, yeah, they were best friends and all, but right now, that only amounted to unspoken 'bro code' kinda stuff, like 'no aiming for the balls or seriously trying to maim each other'. Of course, this meant just about everything else was fair play, which definitely would've worked for Katsuki in any other situation, but there was just one small detail being ignored here.
Izuku was virtually untouchable.
Man, if he only had to deal with Short-Range Telekinesis (you know, his actual Quirk), then this whole thing would've already been game, set, and match, but that obviously wasn't the reality of what he was dealing with here. The fact that he had One for All made it so he was leagues upon leagues ahead of anything Katsuki could do, save for his Quirk's actual output.
"All right, focus," he told himself, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. He didn't get to where he was bitching and moaning about what was and wasn't fair, and he sure as hell wasn't about to start now.
Okay, so exactly how much info did they have to work with? What Yaoyorozu could do was pretty straightforward based on what she told him. Hagakure was completely invisible, which meant she could very easily get the win by just casually walking up the stairs and just capturing the bomb with no one the wiser, but lining the next few floors below the bomb room with tripwires should do the trick.
Maybe they could block off the entirety of the stairs, hole up in the top floor, and wait out the timer?
No, that wouldn't end up working for two reasons: one—Izuku would just end up scaling the building by jumping up the large windows on each floor, if not run all the way up the side of the building. Two—Yaoyorozu didn't have enough fuel in her to do something like that, never mind the fact they just didn't have the time to do that.
No, what they needed was a way to force Izuku to get close enough to Katsuki in order for him to do much of anything. It didn't beat changing the weather, but the payloads he could deliver with Explosion still outperformed what Izuku could currently do with his One for All: Full Cowl 20%, so one dose of the new move he came up with (and still hadn't named) might keep him preoccupied long enough to get the capture tape put on him.
But how could he even get to that point? It wasn't like he could just hide inside something hollow and wait for Izuku to pass by, right?
...
...
...
Wait a minute. No one's seen what the bomb looked like, have they?
(It was at this moment, that Katsuki could've sworn he just felt his mind clear up like a light bulb had gone off in his head.)
"Yaoyorozu. How are you on tripwires?"
"Just simple ones? That'd be well within my capabilities," she replied, slightly tilting her head and her expression turning thoughtful. "But if you're planning this for Midoriya, then I have to tell you it doesn't seem very likely he'd trigger any. I do, however, think they'd be better suited for Hagakure."
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. But I do have an idea for how to take him out."
Yaoyorozu stared at him with her eyebrows raised for a moment before she spoke. "...go on."
Katsuki nodded towards the fake bomb at the end of the room—a large, nondescript-looking thing that was mostly black with a pattern of repeating red lines circling it. "Are you able to tell what the bomb's made out of?"
"It's...papier-mâché, If I'm correct," she said, after placing her hand on the object in question and rubbing its 'shell'.
"Do you think you could make another one like it, but extend the bottom to where it touches the floor, and make a slit a bit bigger than the size of my hand?" he asked, pointing to the thick gloves he was wearing.
For a moment, Yaoyorozu stared at him with what looked like surprise. "...I think I understand where you're going with this. Yes, I can definitely do that. Is it just the one copy?"
"Yeah. Should I leave the room?"
Yaoyorozu nodded. "Please. I would prefer to replace my costume in private."
"Gotcha." Katsuki turned around and moved to exit the—
"Ah, before you do that, Yaoyorozu-shōjo," the voice of All Might suddenly blasted into the room, causing Katsuki to jolt in surprise. A few moments of tense silence followed the man's interjection as Katsuki wondered for a pained second if they weren't allowed to go through with his plan, before he heard All Might speak again.
"Okay, sorry about that. You're good to go now—just needed the class to turn around."
"Oh. Thank you, sensei," Yaoyorozu replied, now facing one of the corners in the room's ceiling, where Katsuki could now see a white security camera looking down at them.
Oh right, the entire rest of the class was watching them, he remembered. It would've been pretty awkward if something happened to her costume in full view of...on second thought, he didn't want to entertain that idea any further.
"Just tell me when you're done," he called out to her, as he walked out of the room towards the stairs.
Hopefully they still had enough time left to get everything done. He really wanted to see the look on Izuku's face when he pulled this off.
Five Minutes Later
"Is that everything?"
"Yeah," Katsuki replied, as he looked over Yaoyorozu's handiwork. "Now it's just the stairs and top floors. Let's go up."
The tripwire he had her place just now looked like how you'd basically expect one to look—a very thin cord that looked almost exactly like fishing line, and placed inside three areas in the first floor's open doorway: the areas where Katsuki's neck, midsection, and shin were. All the other doorways in each floor were booby-trapped like this, except for the ones on the top floor and the one right below it (since they needed to coop up there, and all).
And attached to each tripwire were two small bells located behind both corners, which would fall to the ground after being triggered, making tons of noise. Their purpose was mainly so Katsuki and Yaoyorozu wouldn't be caught off guard when Izuku and Hagakure got close, and it gave them another layer of security to know where exactly they were as they went up each floor.
As they ascended the stairs, Katsuki also had Yaoyorozu line each corner they turned with more tripwires, but this was really just to slow them down even further—putting any bells in areas that didn't have any doorway corners to hide behind would make the tripwires easier to disarm, and would just waste Yaoyorozu's fuel.
When they got to the second-most top floor where the decoy bomb was lying on its side, Katsuki made his way over to the pointed top end and beckoned Yaoyoruzu over as he squatted down.
"I need you to keep this at an angle so I can get inside it. Can you do that?"
"Yes, I should be able to."
Katsuki nodded. "All right, three, two, one—!"
With his hands placed under the decoy on one side and Yaoyorozu taking the other, they started to lift it. It actually wasn't very heavy at all since it was made out of mostly cardboard and completely hollowed out on the inside, but it was still big enough for just one person to not have an easy time getting it upright.
"Okay, just keep it like this," Katsuki then said, once the decoy was tilting towards them, and he quickly moved to the other side and bent down low, moving to get inside. And once he had his entire body in, he placed his hands on the side facing Yaoyorozu so the parts exposed wouldn't just hit the ground hard and dent the stands.
"Bring it towards me!" he called out, his voice slightly raised, and he heard Yaoyorozu grunt as she started pushing, until the decoy bomb was finally standing upright and fully covering Katsuki from view.
"Can you see my feet?"
"No. It's covering you entirely! Are you really sure this will work?"
"It'll have to," he replied. "We're kinda out of other options."
There was zero possibility of either of them (especially Yaoyorozu) holding their own against Izuku if the situation turned to combat, but with this plan he pulled out his ass, they could get the drop on him and maybe, just maybe, manage to win this thing.
Because how do you deal with someone who could move way faster and hit way harder than you? Simple—you start thinking outside the box and try to outsmart the shit outta him.
"I'll head upstairs and start putting up barricades! Good luck, Bakugō-san!" he heard Yaoyoruzu call out, with the sound of her footsteps growing fainter as she walked (probably jogged, actually) away.
"You too!" Katsuki replied, and as the area around him grew increasingly silent he crossed his arms and started to wait.
The sounds of his breathing didn't do much for the inevitable onset of ringing that made up his tinnitus, but he could ignore it easily enough. At least being in a cramped, closed space like this meant it was starting to get hotter in here, and he could already feel his hands starting to build up some good sweat in his gloves.
"Hero team! Villain team! Your ten minutes are over!" All Might's words cut through the silence, and caused his skin to jump for a second from the sudden noise. "Your battle trial starts...NOW!"
Well, here goes nothing, Katsuki thought, dropping his arms to his sides. And with his pounding heartbeat growing larger by the second, he balled his hands into fists and couldn't help but break into a grin as he heard the faint sound of bells ringing, several floors below.
Guess it was showtime now.
A common headcanon for Bakugō is that he has tinnitus (or at least a mild form of it), as a result of his Quirk usage over the years, since his body's natural resistance to Explosion's effects can only help so much. Either way, there isn't gonna be a subplot of him going deaf since he's not the focus of the fic.
Next chapter will cover the rest of the Battle Trial, and then I'll be taking a 1-1.5 month-long break to plan out how I want the USJ and future arcs to go, as well as rewatch and reread Re:Zero and MHA because I'm starting to lose sight of Subaru's personality in this fic (as in I feel like I'm starting to project my own personality on him), not to mention the entire butterfly effect from changing MHA canon from the get-go.
