After a while, Midnight called for the various teams to get into formation. Izuku and his teammates shared looks between themselves and he knew that they were ready. He'd spoken with them about his plan, so all they needed to do now was execute it. Luckily, they were all on board with his ideas, even the more … risky ones. If the goal was to make it as far into the festival as possible, his plans were definitely not completely in service of that goal. However, the actual aim of the festival was to be noticed by as many top pros as possible, and everybody had their eyes on Shoto Todoroki, which meant that, if they went after him exclusively, then they'd have their eyes on Izuku and his teammates by association. He'd already managed that somewhat when he caught up and struggled with Todoroki for first place in the obstacle course, but that wasn't enough. They needed to completely upstage Todoroki. Luckily, Izuku had a few ideas, and he had the perfect team to help him realise those ideas.
They began with Izuku and Kirishima standing side by side and hunkering down. Uraraka then climbed up onto their shoulders and settled down with little difficulty. Izuku felt his face warm up as he helped her up and she had to hold onto him and she settled with her legs hooked around either boy's shoulder. He took a breath to calm himself down, and forced himself not to think about how Uraraka's legs clung to him. Izuku and Kirishima held onto Uraraka by the shins, with Izuku's right hand being gloved for this reason. He did feel a slight squirming in his stomach at having to actively hold onto Uraraka for the next fifteen minutes. Luckily, it wasn't in a very intimate context, so Izuku could focus his mind on the goals they'd been set and not on other things.
Next, Ashido paused for a moment and acid shot out of her shoes, in which there were holes in the bottom. Izuku knew that there were certain items you could bring into the festival with permission from the school, like items that helped focus unwieldy Quirks. Hell, Izuku had some himself in his gloves! He recognised those shoes as the ones from Ashido's hero costume, which allowed acid through without melting, as they must have been made of some resistant material. She tested for a moment how well they let acid through by making the grass in front of her wet and then using that to slide a little bit with every step, very slightly enhancing her speed. She then gave the group a thumbs up, and slid to her place at the front of the formation and grasped Uraraka around the shins as well, leaning forward and letting her arms hang behind her as she readied herself for the starting signal.
The last to get into position was Iida, who placed himself at the rear of the formation and held onto Izuku and Kirishima by the shoulder, opposite from the ones that Uraraka was using as a perch. He gripped tightly, but not uncomfortably, and stretched his legs in preparation for the start of the event. He dug his feet into the grass and planted himself behind the group, waiting for his cue to get started. Iida gave a noise of confirmation, and Izuku knew that everyone was ready. This was going to work, he was sure of it. He had all the best people for what he wanted to do, so it was exceedingly unlikely that any one of them wouldn't be able to pull it off. He'd put his faith in them, and he believed that they were capable of greatness in this festival.
It was time. Everyone held their breaths as Midnight called out that they should be ready to begin. Izuku felt his heart start beating faster in his chest as he started feeling giddy about the approaching battle. This would decide who got into the final event, the one with all the stakes attached, the one that let people see who you were and what you were capable of. Izuku had to get there, and win it all to prove that he was capable of becoming a hero, not only to the public, but to himself, because Izuku knew by now that he was never going to be at peace completely before he was a full blown hero. He thought once that it just wasn't in the cards for him to be happy, but after meeting Uraraka and finding a place he could feel like he belonged at UA, he could actually work at this goal of his. A smile broke out across his face as he geared up for the start of the cavalry battle.
Midnight yelled something, and Izuku didn't even register the word before everyone was moving. The ground lurched under his feet as everyone began to rush forward as they were given the go-ahead to start. Within a second, Izuku began moving his feet and fell into pace with the rest of his team as they dashed forwards, and he collected his senses once again as they moved across the field. It had started so quickly that it was as if Izuku's brain was still lagging behind at their starting position as his body was shot forward by Iida's powerful stride and Ashido and Kirishima pulling him along. As he caught up to himself, Izuku began to process the images flashing on his retinas and overloading his brain, and realised that everyone was sprinting towards Todoroki's group. Izuku finally got his feet under him and managed to run along with his team so that he didn't drag them down in his shocked state. A second shock came when his feet started slipping and sliding on the grass, as if it had been raining for hours. From this, Izuku recovered faster, having recollected his wits and getting his thoughts back under control enough to pull his mind away from the chaos erupting around them and focus on the plan. He let his momentum carry him as he slid a metre or so with every step he took, and Ashido cheered as the acid did the job it was given.
Chaos erupted all around Izuku and his team as every group immediately pointed themselves at Todoroki's team and rushed them. Izuku found himself taking some satisfaction from the fact that they, too, were moving towards him and his team at a fast pace, faster than most others. They soared past a team that looked to be headed up by, and entirely made up by, Mezo Shoji, who didn't have a headband on. He had all six of his arms flared up around his back for some reason, and Izuku looked at him with a baffled expression, dumbfounded at how he'd managed to start the event with that kind of team composition, or lackthereof. He wondered how Shoji had gotten that past Midnight as the referee and judge of the competition, but trusted that it had been by the book if he'd been allowed to do it. He tore his gaze away from Shoji's strange setup as Team Uraraka passed him, sliding at a considerable pace along the ground toward Todoroki's group.
They reached him within moments. They shot out ahead of a number of teams and were head to head with the first place team, and Izuku looked up at Todoroki to evaluate what he was doing. He was looking quizzically at Uraraka and flitting his eyes between her and Izuku. He was confused, he'd expected Izuku to put himself as the head of the horse, as Izuku himself had expected. Logically, it'd make sense for the one making all the plans to put himself on top, but Izuku's Quirk worked best if he could get up close and personal with any projectiles coming their way, and Uraraka's Quirk would have the most benefit if she were on top, so that was the way it had to be. Objective utility instead of an internal sense of self-importance. Todoroki hadn't seemed to have learned that lesson yet. Izuku felt a small smirk come to him as he saw Todoroki raise his right arm, the one his ice always came from. He knew what he was going to try, and readied his own left hand to counter it as he took a breath to speak.
"Swing around!" Izuku said to his team, getting a series of affirming noises from his teammates.
The entire team shifted as one. Izuku was pushed around by their momentum to be the one closest to Todoroki's team, and he met Todoroki's eyes as he continued to smile. The temperature dropped suddenly, and a frigid mist poured out of Todoroki's skin on his left hand. He held that hand out expectantly, as if waiting for something. Yaoyorozu, his front horse, did the same as pink and blue sparkles poured out of the palm of her left hand. Izuku knew that meant she was creating something with her Quirk, and tensed as he went through the possibilities in his head. What could she be making, and what purpose would it serve? A streak of metallic grey flew out and a staff formed out of her hand, which she pointed at the ground and drove an inch or so into the dirt. She then let it grow until it was in Todoroki's reach, and broke it off, creating a pole within reach of Todoroki's ice-side where he could spread his Quirk from. Izuku had noticed that every time Todoroki used his Quirk at range, he couldn't simply create a glacier out of nothing. He had to have a physical conduit for his ice, such as the ground or the wall. He only had one out there on the field, and he couldn't touch the ground or his whole team would be eliminated, so there was only one way; he needed a conduit, such as the pole.
Izuku wasn't able to think any more about it before Todoroki unleashed his Quirk. He grabbed onto the pole and it was near-instantaneously encased in ice that travelled down to the ground in a flash. Then, a sheet of ice crawled along the ground and covered the field in a blue coating of thick frost. The wave of ice reached Izuku and began to crawl up his legs, spreading no matter what. It swam up him and in an instant his lower body, as well as those of his teammates, were encased in a small glacier. The same thing played out, one by one, to all of the other groups, until all of them were trapped with their legs encased in ice, their feet stuck to the ground and unable to move. Izuku shivered as the chill sent a numbness up his body, and his legs shook as much as they could inside the ice. He heard complaints of a similar effect from the whispers of his teammates, and knew he had to act and do something right then and there or Todoroki would get far enough away that it didn't matter if he'd built his team for speed.
Knowing that time was of the essence, Izuku took a steadying breath to shrug off the biting cold and reached his free hand down to the ice wrapped around his legs. He pressed all five of his fingers onto the ice and let his Quirk do the work. A spiderweb of cracks ran along the ice and spread outwards, immediately breaking the ice encasing his legs apart and freeing him, and then within a second doing the same for his teammates. Izuku then took his hand off the ice, leaving the other groups trapped but freeing his own. He looked up at Todoroki, who watched his counter to his big move with harsh, angry eyes that were fixed on Izuku as he Decimated the ice in a rough area of about three and a half metres around him before he stopped his Quirk's workings. He looked up at Todoroki and gave him a satisfied grin, which only seemed to make Todoroki more annoyed with him.
"It looks like Midoriya is the one calling the shots. Keep out of melee," Todoroki said out loud and clear to his crew, still holding Izuku's gaze with his own.
"He's not confident in his close-range combat skills? We need to get up in his face," Izuku said, keeping his voice lower so that only his teammates could hear him, while also staring daggers at Todoroki in return.
Both teams moved at the same time. While everyone else was still trying to get out of their icy traps, Teams Todoroki and Uraraka pounced on each other. Team Uraraka moved forward with the speed it was built for, and Team Todoroki reeled backward in response, trying their best to stay out of range of the majority of their Quirks. Todoroki's team dodged to the side and began breaking apart the thinner frost on the ground as they trod on it heavily. Izuku's team, on the other hand, ran into a problem. They had leapt at Team Todoroki so enthusiastically that they had trouble slowing down on the slick ice, not to mention the further lack of friction brought on by Ashido's acid slide, and so spun out as they tried to stop and slid a few dozen metres past Todoroki's team and only slowed down a few moments later, when Todoroki and his crew were well out of the way. Izuku cursed his lack of foreseeing the complications that Todoroki Quirk would bring to their team composition. It wasn't so easily solved, either, because with Uraraka's Quirk working on everyone but herself, their weight as a group was only Uraraka's weight, and that distributed through as wide an area as they took up didn't create enough pressure to break the ice, so they were unable to slide at the rate they were comfortable with. They had to work with the ice, at least for now, and that meant having to switch it up.
"Ashido, give the acid a break. The ice is enough on its own for now, and we don't want you to exhaust your Quirk," Izuku said, getting a huff of agreement and possibly disappointment from Ashido at the front.
The streams of acid that had been steadily flowing from her shoes stopped, and they slid to a stop on the ice with the solid, yet slick surface underneath them. At this point, a lot of the other groups were breaking out of their own icy prisons. They shattered the ice with repeated strikes against it, and most of the other teams began to tread carefully on the ice and break it with their heavy footfalls. Team Todoroki had managed to escape to the complete other side of the field by now, putting every single other team between themselves and Izuku's group. That wouldn't be very good for their chances at humbling Todoroki and snatching his points. Izuku tried to think of a way that they could both get to Todoroki and take his headband, since they'd made everyone else an obstacle to overcome and Todoroki's Quirk made it near-impossible to overwhelm him in close-quarters combat. He didn't have a good plan for overcoming him yet, just the vague idea of his abilities being concentrated on his left side. Izuku knew that if he could get in range on his left side, because Todoroki either favoured his right arm or couldn't use his left arm with his Quirk, he could employ a little trick he'd been hesitant to break out since the first few days of school when everyone learned about his own Quirk. He just had to get there and not screw it up, which was the hard part.
"Do you think we should lay off him for now?" Kirishima asked.
"Why? We almost had him!" Ashido said, looking back at her red-haired friend with a frown.
"No, he's right," Izuku said, causing his teammates to look at him. "What I want to try next needs a certain shock factor to work, and so we should wait until he refocuses on someone else to make our move with the element of surprise. Good thinking, Kirishima."
"Thanks, man!" Kirishima said, giving him a thumbs up with his free hand. Izuku nodded to him appreciatively.
Izuku, knowing that Todoroki wasn't going to let them sneak up on him anytime soon, looked around the field to look at someone else to go after to create the appearance that they were discouraged from trying for the top spot by their failure. He spotted Shoji running around like a soldier in a warzone, batting away peoples' attempts to snatch a headband that wasn't on his head, and seemingly giving them cocky glances when they realised that fact. Izuku let himself chuckle at that sight, and turned his head back to his group to let them know he wanted to check on Shoji, but something solid connected with the back of his head and he doubled forwards, shocked and pained by the impact. He let out a small gasp of pain as he felt the dull throb of a simple smack pound on the back of his head, and he gritted his teeth to stop himself from whining.
A rush of feet and a haughty laugh then drew Izuku's attention. He looked up once more to see that a team had approached them, led by a boy with very looked-after blond hair heading up their horse. It was the boy that Izuku had chewed out in the hallway about a week ago, the kid from 1B who'd been bad mouthing 1A. His heart beat hard in annoyance that he was getting in Izuku's way right now, but he stamped it down and cleared his heart of negativity so that he could focus on the competition aspect of his appearance at this exact moment. This would be just the thing to get Todoroki to lower his guard against Team Uraraka, plus Izuku would get to take down a trash-talking jerk who insulted his friends, so it was a win-win situation for him and his group. He looked up and couldn't suppress a grin at the way this boy looked so assured of his own superiority, like he knew he'd already bested Izuku. He'd have said something if he was a little quicker on the draw, but with his head still throbbing, it took him a second too many to formulate a witticism or snarky comment, and the blond boy got his word in first.
"I've been looking for you, y'know! Glad to finally catch up to you 1A stars!" the boy screeched like an eagle.
"Oh, it's this guy. Let's peel off and find someone else to dance with," Ashido groaned.
"We can actually use this. Let's see how it plays out," Izuku whispered to the others, who all sighed heavily as they came to terms with the need to interact with this guy. Izuku internally did the same. "Hey," he shouted to the blond with a confident grin, "you never answered my question the other day! You must love us if you're this keen on chasing us everywhere! Care to comment?"
"Joke all you want; it's all trivial to people like you anyway. It doesn't even matter, because now I have the power to one-up you main characters!" the boy cried, articulating wildly with his hands as if he were in some kind of Shakespearean play. Izuku wondered what he meant by 'people like him', but put it out of his mind for now.
"What, because you have more friends with you now? Didn't seem to stop you last time, and you got dunked on then, too!" Uraraka yelled, making Izuku laugh at how brash she could really be when she thought it was worth it.
Izuku briefly agreed with her, that he was more confident because he had a bigger entourage with him as his team, with the same tall silver-haired boy from last week and a few more people that Izuku didn't recognise all supporting him from underneath, but there was something about this boy now that was different, like his eyes somehow told Izuku that he knew something nobody else did.
"You, idiots! You've got no idea what Monoma's capable of, do you?" the silver-haired guy yelled, finally giving a name to the blond one. Izuku honestly hadn't cared enough to ask, and even if he had, he'd probably not bother to remember it, just because he didn't really like the guy, but something was weird about this situation, and Izuku latched onto every piece of knew information that he could.
"I'm done playing around with words. You think you're so great, but what happens when the one thing that makes you special is taken from you, huh? What happens if your very Quirks are no longer your own anymore? What then, superstars?" Monoma screamed, cackling at a joke only he seemed to understand.
"What?" Izuku muttered, followed by a sharp intake of air as he gasped in realisation. Monoma must have done something when he smacked Izuku in the back of the head while passing by. But what? Could it be Quirk related? It had to be, since Monoma himself had brought up their Quirks. What had he done, though? He couldn't know until the boy said it himself, so Izuku sat tight and listened to the rant continue with his curious gaze locked onto the blond.
"I've got a very special kind of power, y'see, a power that is unrivalled by any of your pathetic little water guns and hard heads," Monoma said, giving Ashido and Kirishima a condescending little chuckle and a cocky grin as he spoke down to them and the rest of the team. "My Quirk is called Copy, and I think you can guess what it does from just that!"
"No way," Izuku thought out loud as his voice broke.
"Yes way. I've got your Quirk!"
