Izuku sat on the bus, repeating his mantra to himself under his breath. He had been on the bus for about five minutes, and he really didn't know when he'd stop being surprised by UA's never ending well of money to pull from when building their training grounds. The bus had passed two Battle Centres so far, which meant that the third, Izuku's, was up next. It seemed like each Battle Centre was it's own small city, so Izuku didn't know where the school got the funding for that sort of construction. Maybe they were funded by the government, but Izuku knew that at least a few of the top Heroes, including All Might and Best Jeanist, had a sizable chunk of their money go to UA. It was breathtaking to see the horizon not stretch past the training grounds of the legendary institution, but he was here, so he had to ignore that and focus on the trials to come.

That small reminder of All Might saddened Izuku, though. He remembered when he had met the man, when he had said that there were Quirks that simply couldn't do good. That had caused Izuku to be a nervous wreck for weeks after, but he was past that, now. That was ten months ago, and he had moved on. Izuku couldn't help but remember All Might's haunted expression when he had asked his question, though. It was like he had seen a ghost, or was remembering a specific person, or thing. Izuku guessed that his reaction was warranted, due to having so many years as a Hero under his belt. Spending that long fighting the absolute worst humanity has to offer must change you, and not often for the better.

He had to focus on the exam, though. Izuku looked around, seeing the different applicants that he would have to beat. He didn't like thinking of people like that, but he had to if he wanted to win. He'd need to overcome any obstacle, and that meant that he was going to have to get in the way of some peoples' dreams. He had learned that a long time ago.

Izuku looked over to his left to see that the girl that had sat next to him was doing some meditation technique, and that she was being careful to never touch anything with more than four of her fingers. Izuku immediately recognized that she had a five point activation Quirk, the thought of which was reinforced by the small pads on the girl's fingertips. They were pink, and looked like they were solid, and not kind of squishy, like some of the five point activation Quirks he'd seen. The girl looked like she was incredibly adept at moving her fingers around so that she didn't accidentally use her Quirk, instead of taking the admittedly easier way with wearing gloves, like Izuku had. Izuku knew that it was kind of lazy to not work to be able to control his hands, but he couldn't take the chance that he'd accidentally destroy something. It was a matter of the safety of those around him, not laziness.

"Hey. You've got a five point activation Quirk, right?" the girl asked, snapping Izuku out of his thoughts.

"Uh, yeah! How'd you know?" Izuku asked.

"Your gloves. I've looked at ones like that, but I eventually decided against it," she explained.

"Right. I guess it's a good skill to have in case I'm ever without my gloves, but I'm planning for my Hero costume to have a feature that deals with that if I get in," Izuku said.

"Oh? What would that be?" the girl asked, shifting herself so that she didn't have to strain her neck to look over at him.

"I'd have the gloves of my costume be able to retract on command, giving me access to my Quirk only when I want. It'd do this through a series of plates, small but strong, that would form a sort of cocoon around my fingers with the press of a button. What about you?" Izuku explained.

"I was planning for gloves, too, but I'd just have the gloves have little openings for my pads. Nothing as technologically advanced as your idea," the girl said, a light blush coming over her face. Izuku searched his memory and found that she always had a small blush on her face, no matter what she was doing.

"That's a great idea! I'd do that, but my Quirk is a bit too dangerous to trust my own skill at containing it," Izuku said, smiling sadly.

"Oh, what's your Quirk?" the girl asked.

Izuku paused. What if she freaked out? What if she was afraid of him? What if she got him disqualified for having a Villain's Quirk?

'No! None of that. You're gonna be a Hero. Heroes don't second guess themselves,' Izuku thought, turning to the girl once again.

"I call it Decimation. If all five of my fingers touch something, it disintegrates. It only takes a moment, and if I overuse it, I get kind of dehydrated, but it's pretty good for clearing debris and destroying physical attacks," Izuku explained his Quirk.

The girl had a shocked expression on her face, but other than that, she was unreadable. Izuku wondered how she would react, but she gave herself away soon enough. It was like a switch had been flipped in her brain, and her eyes went wide and her smile, which had never wavered, grew even brighter.

"That's awesome! I bet you'd be an amazing Hero with that!" the girl exclaimed, getting some of the other applicants to look at her in annoyance.

"Really?" Izuku asked.

This was … new. Izuku had always encountered disgust and fear when he explained his Quirk, so he was understandably kind of shaken when this girl had reacted in even a somewhat positive way, let alone the openly enthusiastic tone she carried now. She was closer, now, the girl clearly being very easily excitable. That wasn't bad, it was just that Izuku didn't really have a lot of experience with people being close to him, let alone girls.

"Yeah! That's way better than my Quirk! Yours can be used for rescue and fighting. Mine's just good for lifting heavy things," the girl said, suddenly downcast.

"What's your Quirk?" Izuku asked, worried that he had made her feel bad.

"I call it Zero Gravity. If all five of the pads on one hand touch something at the same time, that object will be unaffected by the pull of gravity. It'll just float away until I cancel my Quirk," she answered.

"No way, that's almost perfect for Hero work! You could lift rubble off trapped civilians, you could disrupt attacks by cancelling Villains' gravity, you could do stealth by hovering, if you're capable, you could do a load of things that fit into almost any category of Hero! You just have to decide what niche you want to fill. I want to be a rescue Hero. What about you?" Izuku rambled.

"I want to be a rescue Hero as well! I guess we match, with our Quirks and our goals!" the girl cheered.

"I guess so. Oh, I never got your name, did I? Well, I'm Izuku Midoriya!" he introduced himself.

"Ochako Uraraka! Pleased to meet you, Midoriya," she responded in kind.

"Pleased to meet you, too, Uraraka," Izuku said, smiling brightly.


The bus ride wasn't long after that. The applicants shuffled out of the bus and stretched their limbs, getting ready for the task ahead of them. Izuku would have liked to do the written portion of the exam before the practical, but something had come up during the time his group was supposed to sit it, so they were doing it the day after. That meant that he had an extra night to revise, but it also meant that he had a lot more riding on the written rather than the practical. If he had done the written before the practical, he would've put a lot of his mental energy into the former, and put a lot of his physical energy into the latter, instead of wasting all of his physical energy before having to spend three hours answering questions and filling in bubbles on sheets of paper. That wouldn't be pleasant.

Izuku carefully removed his gloves, finger by finger, until they were completely off. He felt naked. He felt like if anything touched him, it would break. He had to calm down. Izuku vaguely recognized that he had gone stiff, and slowly started to release the tension that had overcome his body. He stretched his fingers, making sure that they were as far apart as possible to avoid accidentally Decimating anything. Izuku steadied his breathing, making sure that he was as calm as possible before letting himself go. He let himself just stand there, grounding himself with the feeling of the light breeze between his fingers, and the way his hair bounced around with the wind, and how he knew that people were looking at him, but he didn't, wouldn't care.

A faint noise alerted Izuku to the fact that there was a large tower off to the side of the large gate made of cement in front of them. The Battle Centres all looked to be surrounded by humungous walls that circled the entire radius of the zones, and the entrances to each seemed to be carved out from the all, seeing as this gate was a set of doors made from the same stone as the walls, which looked to open inwards judging by the motorized hinges that were on the outside, rather than the inside. The tower was the source of the sound, and without a telescope, Izuku couldn't be sure, but he suspected it was Present Mic, due to the noise sounding suspiciously like a man incapable of suppressing laughter trying to do so.

"GO!" Present Mic screamed, shaking the ground underneath the applicants.

Izuku was startled by the shout, his carefully splayed out fingers curling into fists as he tensed at the sound. That moment of hesitation extended to his peers as well, who paused their conversation at the unprompted scream.

"What? Real life battles don't have countdowns, people! Get going, Heroes!" Present Mic yelled again, sending the applicants into a panic.

The crowd of applicants surged forward, bringing Izuku with them in their hurry. He was almost swept off his feet with how fast and discordantly they were moving, but he managed to stay on the ground and find his footing as he began to run with them, instead of running because of them. He ran for a few moments, before seeing his opportunity to escape the horde and leapt to the side, right through a gap between the applicants just big enough for him to comfortably fit through among the pushing and pulling of the frenzy Present Mic's announcement caused.

Izuku ran to the left, which as a consequence of the others mostly being pulled along for the ride and not being able to really move for themselves, was almost entirely empty for him to go to town on the robots within. He spotted at least fifteen robots on the street he was running down, with them being split up fairly evenly between point values, with the higher point values being just a bit rarer than the value under them. There were six 1-Pointers, five 2-Pointers and four 3-Pointers, and there were only two other applicants on this street, so if he were to go after 1 and 2-Pointers, they'd be forced to confront the 3-Pointers while he slipped away to earn more points.

Izuku had also realized that the point values were kind of meaningless. With how many robots of each point value seemed to be assigned to each area, there were actually more points in going after the 1-Pointers, rather than going after the 2 and 3-Pointers specifically, since there were more of them overall. There must have been something like one hundred points for every applicant, so that made it around fifteen thousand points in the entire zone, which meant that, going off the ratio of point values he'd seen in the street, there were about six thousand 1-Pointers, five thousand 2-Pointers, and four thousand 3-Pointers. He doubted they'd all be destroyed, but that was the average distribution if they worked it out so that every student could achieve a score like one hundred points. It was more worth it to go for the smaller targets, which were easier and less time consuming to defeat, rather than to showily take down the bigger bots with time consuming moves. Izuku totally had this.

Approaching the first 1-Pointer he could, Izuku dodged the insultingly telegraphed swing of its arm as he got as close to the thing as possible. When he was close enough, Izuku reached out and grabbed the robot by its head, this point value being small enough for that maneuver to work. The robot's head was dust in a moment, and Izuku quickly moved on before he could be caught under the collapsing hunk of dead weight.

He ran down the street, moving as fast as he could with his regular human legs. Izuku had learned that his Quirk was a mutation, something completely unrelated to either of his genetic lines. That meant that the fact that he got Decimation as a Quirk and not All Might tier Super Strength or the ability to move as fast as he wanted was sheer coincidence. His genes really had the chance to give him something on the level of a god, but he was stuck with Decimation, which, while powerful and extraordinary in its own way, just wasn't really Izuku's style. He didn't think anybody would guess that Izuku, who loved everything Heroes and wanted to help people more than anything, had the power to disintegrate with a touch. Especially if they believed the theory that Quirks were tied to and influenced by the personality of their users.

Izuku, as he ran toward another 1-Pointer, remembered how Present Mic had spoken about how the definition of 'defeat' was stretched for the exam. In the context of the exam, 'defeat' was making sure that a robot could not fight back. That meant that incapacitation was on the table, which made Izuku's job a lot easier, as well as far more fun than having to get up closer and personal with the robots, which made the smell of iron that had been burned into his memory all the more visceral.

He ran toward a pairing of bots, letting his arms hang by his sides. Izuku waited until he got close enough, and as soon as he was, he shot his arms out to his sides as far as he could, sliding his fingers along one of each bot's legs. He ran to a safe distance, before slowing down to see the aftermath.

Izuku could already see that the bottom part of the legs he had used his Quirk on were severed, and some of the Decimation had spread along the limbs before he had pulled his hands away. The robots swayed, and one tried to fire at him, but that made it worse. The robot that had fired, a 1-Pointer, was blown to the side, unable to protect itself from the recoil of its own weapon with a leg missing. It crashed into the second bot, a 2-Pointer, which had already begun to tilt. The two bots' heads slammed together, denting them significantly and causing the lights that Izuku guessed were meant to be eyes to shut off, the bots having been defeated.

"Alright!" Izuku cheered, before running off to get some more points.

He had already destroyed two 1-Pointers and one 2-Pointer, which meant that he had four points. Not bad for only a few moments' worth of work. Izuku took a deep breath as he pushed his body to its limit to get him to the next grouping of robots as fast as it could move him, as he knew he would need far more points to get into UA. The school never released any information on the entrance exam, or any of their exams really, so none of the students had any leverage over the other on the day. That meant that, unfortunately, nobody was really certain on how many points they needed to pass, so they were just rushing to get as many as possible, oftentimes attacking bots that other applicants were already fighting just to secure enough points to pass. That wasn't really heroic, it was just what was needed to make sure they made it into UA, which didn't end up happening anyway, for the vast majority.

The exam went on like that for a few minutes, with Izuku racking up seven or so points for every minute that passed, if he had done the math correctly. By the eight minute mark, he had collected just over fifty points for himself, and he was confident that was enough to get the judges' attention. He had also been stopping every few moments to help applicants, whether it be because they fell or that they were having a hard time defeating the robots they were fighting; he'd help them out. Present Mic had said that the point went to the applicant who dealt the final blow, so if Izuku had to encroach on another person's mark, he always let them get the kill so that the points would be awarded to them, and not himself. He wanted everything to work out as fairly as possible, and if that meant sacrificing some points so that another person could get their fifteen minutes of fame, then so be it. He was sure that he had enough points to pass, and if not, he could get the quota before the time ran out.

That was when the shaking started. Something deep in the earth began to rumble, and the ground shook as small shockwaves pulsed throughout the Battle Centre. Izuku looked around, but wasn't able to see the source of the shaking. He saw that other people could feel it too, and were similarly looking for where the miniature earthquake was coming from, so he wasn't imagining it. Izuku was brought back to reality by the slight dizziness that made the shaking of the ground that much worse, and the dryness of his mouth that made him yearn for a drink of water. He knew that he was pushing his limits Quirk-wise, but he had to keep going. If he was going to be a Hero, he'd have to push every limit he had until he shattered them with no hesitation, so this was going to be good practise.

Suddenly, Izuku felt just a bit colder than before. There was a certain warmth in him when he started to overuse his Quirk, probably his body overheating due to the dehydration. The shade that had come over him was a nice change from that, but he was smarter than to take that as it was, and he turned to look at the source of the shade.

It was a massive goddamned robot. A massive, skyscraper sized robot whose foot could probably crush one of the buildings that were around, so Izuku didn't want to think about what it could do to him, or any other regular person in range.

What was UA thinking? How could they pit children against something that looked like it should fight Godzilla? Izuku looked around, seeing the horrified faces of other applicants as they realized what it was that they were looking at. It was like they were staring at the incomprehensible demon Cthulhu, and they weren't quite sure if they wanted to simply die or go insane from the revelations this metal monstrosity was forcing upon their fragile psyches. It seemed that 'run away' was the most prevalent answer, as the applicants all ran as fast as they could in whatever direction got them further away from the steel stampede in humanoid form.

Izuku only hesitated for a moment more before he saw that the 0-Pointer was winding up. As the monster's first reached the apex of its swing, more and more people around him began to realize just the kind of power that UA was willing to casually play around with. This thing could take on most of the top ten Heroes, and probably win against an uncomfortable amount of them.

Izuku turned and ran. Fast. He bolted in the opposite direction, falling into step with the other applicants as they moved away from the gigantic robot and started to take out robots on the other side of the zone. Izuku allowed himself to be carried by the crowd as he took the chance to rest his legs, which had begun to fatigue after going at full capacity for the entire exam. He couldn't sneak a look at his watch, so had no idea if he was two seconds or minutes from the exam ending and him being locked in at … fifty three points, doing the math in his head quickly.

A loud BOOM echoed around the area, and Izuku watched as a gigantic cloud of dust and smoke was kicked up by the impact of the 0-Pointer's fist on what looked to be the ground. Buildings around the bot shook, and some even came down due to the shockwaves produced by the impact. Izuku wondered how much damage it could do to a person of his size when it had taken down a lot of the buildings around itself by just hitting the ground next to them.

Just as Izuku was about to turn the corner, he heard a small sound over the hustle and bustle of the other applicants. It sounded painful, like someone was struggling. He broke free of the crowd and saw that a massive chunk of rubble from one of the buildings' collapse had come down on an applicant. He saw that they had a familiar tracksuit on, and … that was Uraraka! Izuku whipped his head around to the other applicants, but they had all moved on, attacking other robots further down the street and out of the radius of the 0-Pointer's attacks.

"Hey! Won't anybody help her?" Izuku yelled, to no avail.

He looked back at the scene before him and made the best judgement call he could, which wasn't very good even on a good day. Izuku saw that the robot was moving toward him, which meant that it was moving toward Uraraka, who couldn't move because of the huge slabs of concrete pinning her down, which meant that she'd be stepped on if he didn't do anything. Izuku quickly judged the distance between himself and Uraraka, and between Uraraka and the 0-Pointer, before taking off running toward the two of them, moving as fast as his tired legs would let him.

It took almost no time at all to get to Uraraka, and he had been even further from her than the 0-Pointer had been, so he had to act fast. Izuku quickly checked how heavy the rubble was, and found himself unable to move it. He kept his pinky finger off the rubble, so as to not Decimate it and have a piece of the top fall through the dusted rubble underneath and crush the both of them. Izuku saw that the 0-Pointer was getting closer and closer, though, and saw no other option than to use his Quirk on the rubble, pull Uraraka out from under it as fast as he could and hope for the best.

"Midoriya?" Uraraka asked, faintly. She was clearly concussed.

"Yeah, it's me! I'm gonna get you out, okay? Just stay still for me and go as fast as you can in that direction," he pointed down the street, "when I say so. Okay?" Izuku yelled over the churning of the 0-Pointer's gears and the clanking of chains.

Uraraka gave him a weak thumbs up, so he proceeded. Izuku took a deep, steadying breath, and placed both of his hands, with all five fingers making contact, on the rubble on top of Uraraka. Izuku had found that, while one hand was usually enough to Decimate something of a decent size, using both hands on one object quickened the rate at which it disintegrated. It also made the drawbacks on his Quirk twice as extreme. Izuku tried his best to have some kind of control over how fast the Decimation spread, trying to hurry his Quirk along in turning the gigantic chunk of cement to dust.

A spiderweb of cracks almost instantaneously formed all around the largest piece of rubble, the one pinning Uraraka. The different segments fell apart, most of the chunk turning to dust and smaller pebbles, nothing harmless, but a dangerous amount of the rubble was left intact, and that was what Izuku had worried about. Izuku staggered forward due to the lack of rubble to support his body, and immediately felt a surge of pain in his head, and his throat dried up more than it already had. He was beginning to really feel the effects of dehydration now, and he wasn't sure if he'd be able to conjure enough power in his voice to instruct Uraraka.

"Now!" Izuku croaked, his voice coming out as a hoarse cough more than a shout.

Uraraka mumbled something, but picked herself up anyway. It was clear that her ankle was injured, so Izuku leapt at her as the top layer of rubble began to fall. The blocks of cement impacted the ground, and sent another shockwave out, throwing both the applicants into the air as they tried to escape the aftermath of Izuku's Quirk usage. The blast sent them quite the distance, Izuku rolling along the road for a few moments before coming to a stop with his eyes on Uraraka's unconscious body.

Suddenly, everything stopped. All the noise, movement and chaos was completely stopped by the announcement that the exam had ended. It was a relief, but that only meant that a whole new anxiety could take over. Izuku tried to pull himself off the ground, but found that his arms wouldn't obey his mind. Nothing worked, and he just laid there as he choked on his own dry tongue. He felt himself fading away, knowing that with the level of dehydration he had been operating at, he'd pass out at any minute.

Uraraka was safe, though. It was worth it. He had saved someone with his Quirk! He'd done it. He'd taken the first step in proving all those dumb bullies wrong. He'd actually helped someone by using his Quirk, and that made all the difference. He could rest easy, knowing that because of his efforts, Uraraka was safe. He vaguely recognized that he had been lifted off the ground by something, but passed out before he could find out what.