Chapter Fifty-Nine
Arms and legs smarting from a dozen impacts, Momo Yaoyorozu ran down the city street, handcuffs bouncing from where she'd threaded them through her belt, flanked by her classmates, Tenya Ida and Yuga Aoyama. "We need to find cover!" she called over her shoulder, even as the windows of the buildings in front of them were broken, more robotic turrets leaning out.
Unlike the first ones, these didn't fire beanbag rounds, but blue pellets that hit the ground around them, exploding outwards into blooms of distinctive blue foam. "Right!" she called out, turning and running for the nearest doorway, even as all three of them were hit by the binding material.
"Understood!" Ida replied, blazing past her, stopping at the door, which wouldn't open. "It's locked!" he reported unnecessarily, and she nodded, already forming a block of iron around her clenched fist, like Armor Warrior had taught her. Throwing her full momentum into the blow, she struck the door just so, breaking it open and practically falling inside, her classmates quickly following.
As soon as Aoyama ran in, the sound of firing stopped, the boy looking down at his costume in distress. "How incredibly unshiny! I thought we were fighting Power Loader, not more robots!"
Momo focused on the foam on her skin, creating a single-molecule layer of carbon, so that the sticky material stuck to that instead, falling off her. Following a hunch, she created a bit of the counter-substance that Denki's friend Mei had created, applying it to the foam still stuck to her costume, only for it to turn into gritty blue sand.
"Ma amie, you have a way of letting me sparkle again?" the blonde boy asked, sudden very close to her.
"I, um, yes, of course!" she smiled, creating just enough to clean off the boy's armor, needing to conserve her reserves. It was as she did so that she realized the lenses on his shoulders had been blocked. "Can you use your Quirk through those?" she asked, trying to understand what her teammates could do.
'Understand your tools, and use them rightly. If you do, victory is inevitable,' Armor Warrior had said during her internship, and while her teammates weren't tools, their abilities were, just as much as her own Quirk was.
"Oui!" he smiled happily, with an unnecessary twirl, his cape tied down, two magnets pinning the material against the student's armor to prevent it from flapping about. "I can route the beam from my belly out through my shoulders and knees, or all at once, so I cannot be taken by surprise!"
"Unless they attack you from the back," Momo nodded, understanding it to be a distribution system. With their fighting multiple opponents, apparently, that would be an asset.
The half-French boy blinked. "Pardon?"
"Your lenses are all facing forwards," Yaoyorozu stated, clarifying, as she hadn't explained her comment enough. "You can turn around slightly," she mimed, twisting at the waist, "but your range of motion is somewhat limited. If you had another pair of lenses, perhaps on the backs of your hands, you'd be able to attack anything behind you." She held up a hand, as if to ask a question, closing it into a fist and jerking it back for emphasis. "But this is still an improvement."
"I, yes," the boy agreed. "This is merely the first stage of my costume, as I gain marvelous skill with my new use! The next set, will of course, include focusing lenses on the backs of my hands."
"And then your third will have one on your back," she nodded, understanding the boy's methodology.
"Have no doubt," Aoyama smiled, winking. "But. . . why do you think I would have it? So I'm certain we're on the same page."
Momo hadn't expected the quiz, but the answer was obvious. "For mobility! You used your Quirk to move yourself during our first day, with it on you back you wouldn't have the awkward positioning that caused you to fall."
" Tres Magnifique!" her classmate smiled, "As expected from our class president!"
Ida added, "My costume offers no benefit to my Quirk, other than making sure my exhaust pipes have air circulation. There is some defensive benefit, obviously, and it provides striking surfaces. Now, our plans are obvious no longer viable, as we are not fighting Power-Loader directly. Do you have any ideas? Also, could you remove the foam from my armor?"
"Certainly!" She smiled, mind working. She hadn't expected turrets of all things, but, from her discussions with Denki, the robots the school used were actually quite complex. If they could create attack robots en masse, they certainly could create turrets, which only required a targeting software, as opposed to programs to help them move. Well, move more than shifting their position from a stable base. A few swipes of her hand, and he was clean, then she took a step to the doorway, creating an emergency blanket, the requirements to make the super thin aluminized silver not even noticeable to her reserves.
A bit of hardened foam was packed inside, just enough to provide a weight, and she tossed it out. Sure enough, it was shot, but after a second and a half, and even then, two-thirds of the shots missed, hitting where the blanket was before it hit the ground and rolled.
That's it! She thought, smiling at the latency. "Aoyama, Ida, you'll need to be the ones that do this. Aoyama, could you shoot the targets?"
"Oui, ma amie!" the hero student smiled, with a little salute, which dropped a little. "But not in time to get all three before they sully my costume once more."
"Ida-" Momo started to ask, but the young man was already ahead of her.
With a clenched fist of determination, he promised, "I can carry Aoyama! Not a round will hit my teammate!"
It's not a round, it's a pellet, she thought, but that didn't matter, so she smiled as well, taking a step away from the door. "I'm counting on both of you!"
Both boys nodded, looked at each other a little awkwardly, before Ida turned around, Aoyama climbing on, piggy-back. "Let's begin!" Ida stated, getting an affirmative hmm from the other boy, and both blazed out, faster than Momo could hope to move.
Watching from the window, she waited nervously, hoping that she hadn't gotten her teammates captured. Aoyama focused, and bolts of shining energy leapt from his shoulders, hitting targets out of sight. Pellets were fired back, but Ida was several steps ahead of them, repositioning, but stopping long enough for his partner to fire once more. Four exchanges later, and the pellets stopped, both boys sighing in relief.
Walking outside, she saw the windows that the turrets had hid behind were blown open completely, wrecked, sparking metal inside. Checking the watch she'd created for this test, she saw they still had twenty-six minutes left. "Very good, but let's keep going!" she smiled, both boys smiling back, and they took off.
Fourteen minutes later, they were not as confident as they had been before.
When they were ambushed by turrets, and they were, repeatedly, they had a plan, but that was not the only trap their opponent had set. Motion-activated net-guns, capture foam mines, pit traps, pit traps lined with capture foam mines, pit traps with capture foam mines that then dropped nets on you, it kept going. They had learned that having Ida run ahead would trip the pit traps, only to discover that there were sticky invisible wires that had caught the speedster like a giant spider web, and they'd needed Aoyama to blast the boy free, Momo's tools unable to cut it, so to speak.
Then had come the robots.
So many robots.
Aoyama had held his own, while Momo had needed to create explosives to hold them off from the other direction, Ida jumping in to take any that she missed, the two of them together barely matching the blond boy's damage output. However, the ensuing nausea from using his Quirk had put him out of commission for two minutes each time, eating away at their allotment, Momo carrying the boy while Ida once more scouted ahead.
Had she over-relied on her Quirk, as she often did when she first came to UA, doing so would've slowed her down and fatigued her. However, her training, both with her friends, and with Armor Warrior, had shown her that her body merely was another tool in her arsenal, and one that needed to be honed beyond the point of no longer being a liability, but into a strength in of itself.
Ida turned a corner, only for the sound of turrets firing to come far too quickly, the boy running back around, armor half-covered with expanding bits of blue foam. Putting Aoyama down, Momo freed the boy of his still-forming prison, wincing as her reserves continued to dwindle. She had just over a third remaining, the tools she'd needed to fight the robots having taken large chunks, and the unending low-level drain of creating the anti-foam fluid a constant nibble on her stamina.
"There's over a dozen, and it's a tightly packed alley," the speedster reported. "We have to go around."
Nodding, Momo turned to one of the nearby buildings, which had been built so close together that they could be considered one structure, peering inside a window.
A nest of mines looked back.
Moving to another building, the windows were boarded up, but a prybar opened it quickly, only to reveal more mines. Trying the door of the boarded-up building, she found it, unlike so many in the area, was unlocked, but the mine placement she'd seen from the blocked window would've made them invisible from the entrance if you opened it and walked in.
"Clear the doorway," she requested, both boys nodding, as she made an emergency blanket shroud for the prybar, giving it enough movement to trigger the explosives. Tossing it inside, she took cover beside the door, as, with a collective, hissing bang, the mines went off, a bit of foam expanding out the entrance, which would've sealed the door had it been closed.
Trying to look inside, she was met with a mass of foam, making the space completely impassible without draining her reserves, making enough neutralizing liquid to clear a path. She'd been conserving it by only dissolving the point where the hardened foam had stuck to her teammates, but they were running out of time, so she couldn't try and conserve it by removing it in blocks.
Retreating further, she pulled the red flashlight she'd made after the second time they'd found wires, and shone it inside the next suspiciously unlocked door. Glinting inside, a spider-web of wires was revealed. " We've been funneled," she realized, with growing dread. What had I missed? She thought. We took the shortest path, whenever we found an intersection. Was that it?
It had to be, and they'd not bothered to look around, as focused as they were on their goal. How stupid I've been! she frowned, but shook her head. No, there's no time to focus on that. The other two looked to her, waiting, and she wasn't going to disappoint them.
She needed more information.
Moving up to the turn in the alley, she created a mirror and used it to look around the corner, only to have the reflective metal hit by a pellet, whose foam grew to encompass her hand, and she considered what she'd seen while she waited the two seconds for it to set. Two dozen turrets, staggered placement, but ground level, and with clear paths.
As she made a thin layer of material from her hand, slipping out of the hardened foam, she tried to think of what her friends would do. Denki would charge in, relying on his strength, speed, and alternate form to avoid the shots. Mina would cover herself with her acid, using it to take the hits for her, and roll over everything.
Could she. . . could she do both? "Give me a moment," she said, holding out a hand. This was going to be. . . difficult. She could create anything, but when one's palette was infinite, that made it infinitely easier to make a mistake. A shield as a base, she thought, pulling out her 'Yaoyorictionary', from its place on her back, the magnetically closed book springing open, and she quickly paged through her compiled notes on how to make anything she didn't already know by heart. The shield and neutralizing fluid she could make in her sleep, but they were discrete things, while this, this would be different.
Combining the two would be much more difficult. Well, just making the shield and covering it with the liquid would be rather easy, but that would only stand up to one hit. The pellet that had hit her hand had done so much harder than the previous turrets had, but she could use that to her advantage.
Balloons? Yes. But divided. Hexagonal? Her thoughts played out, as she tried to use the same kind of visualization that she'd trained with Denki, when he, bless his heart, had tried to teach her the blueprints for every Support Item he could, as skill she'd then refined during her internship.
If Mei's creations were novels, and Denki's chapters, what she required was a Haiku. Ease and depth in one, and all the harder for it, that's what she needed. Mechanical plans, not electronic design, pressure-based triggers. Aluminum cells, with fluid filled reservoirs, membranes holding fast.
Her arm glowed as her creation was produced, and she almost forgot the handle, fitting it in just in time, presenting the finished project to Ida. The hexagonal pieces on the front shifting slightly and clinking. "Use this," she commanded. "Charge the turrets. They focus on the closest target, unless you shoot at them, so after he's started, Aoyama, you start shooting, but only at the closest one." Arm glowing again, she made a second hex-shield. "I'll cover you," she promised, as the boy's accuracy wasn't one hundred percent, and a single close miss would shift the turret's focus.
"Ready?" she asked with a tired grin. They still had a third of the distance they needed to cover left, but the last fifth of the arena was an open field, which worried her.
Both boys returned with tired grins, Ida psyching himself with a shouted declaration of, "I shall persevere!" before running, as fast as he could, around the corner. The turrets opened fire almost instantly, but the boy kept running and the two of them turned the corner as well, Aoyama focusing his waist-laser, the one he was the most accurate with, and took out the first turret right as Ida almost reached it, the gun emplacement turning to shoot the speedster in the back.
It exploded in a shower of metal, and the blond boy's next two shot hit as well, giving Ida more breathing room, but his fourth shot missed, the turret re-targeted on the French-boy, whose eyes widened in fear. To his credit, he barely hesitated, firing, missing again, and Momo waited, watching the turret's barrel, and, as soon as she saw the end contract as it fired, she stepped in front of her teammate, the round hitting her shield.
The hex compressed, and the membrane broke, coating the shield with anti-foam fluid, causing the forming bindings to dissolve before it could fully expand. She stepped aside, Aoyama taking another shot, Ida slowing down just a little, and the turret was destroyed, the engine-legged boy resuming his charge, as the other two moved forward, following.
They kept going, the worry that this wouldn't be enough at the back of her mind, and when there were only four turrets left, Ida's membranes ran dry, and he started to accumulate foam on the shield, struggling to keep it up. When there were only two left, he stumbled, going down, and both turrets refocused on the remaining two students. It was up to Momo to try and block shots, moving faster than arrows, though thankfully slower than bullets.
Momo, blocking one shot as Aoyama took out one of the last turrets, saw she was out of position, and threw out a fist, catching another shot with it as her partner took out the last emplacement. Moving up quickly, she freed her bruised, smarting hand, and moved her shield over the now-bound Ida, hitting it with palm strikes to pop the remaining membranes, and pour the anti-foam fluid over the student, freeing him.
Less than a quarter left, she thought, having to make more fluid to fully free the boy. And six minutes left. "We need to move faster," she said as she bent down, pulling off her shoes to make the skates Mei had designed. "Ida, carry Aoyama. If we don't make this soon, we're not going to make it at all!"
The other boys nodded, jumping together, and the three of them dashed down the street, right into the jaws of another turret ambush, but this was the slower variety, and Momo took point, taking hits while covering herself with a thin coating of anti-foam fluid, making it drop right off her. They sped down another straightaway, turning the corner only to find Power-Loader working, holding some sort of gun, which he used to set up another sticky line. Several small, grey robots, moving in pairs and carrying turrets, looked at the heroes and quickly rolled away, and out of sight.
" Well, you're faster than I thought," the Pro commented blandly, even as Aoyama's blasts tore the network of wires apart, and Momo, with a sweep of her hand, used a thin layer of the same foam he'd been trapping them with to cover the lines, hardening in two seconds and providing a safe walkway.
"Have, have you been setting things up right in front of us this entire time?" Momo demanded. She'd been wondering how they had kept running into so much resistance.
Power Loader just looked at her for a moment, before nodding shameless. "Yes."
"But, how?" she demanded, and as the Hero waited a beat before he started to answer, she realized that the man was running out the clock. "Doesn't matter. Ida, Aoyama, run for the exit. It should be clear, but keep an eye out!" she ordered, both boys starting to run past them, Power Loader moving his bright yellow open-cockpit power armor to stop them, only for her to dart in, creating a taser and lunging for the shirtless man's chest, and forcing him backwards.
He swept an arm at her, with far more speed than she'd expected out of his bulky robotic suit, but she bent down, low, over it, spraying the man down with foam. See how he liked it. However, before it touched him, the fluid hit something and bounced off, splashing uselessly on the ground.
"Didn't think I'd use that on you without building in a defense, did you?" the Pro Hero asked, amused, as the other two students left the alley, turning and running off further down the maze of corridors. She tried to hit him with the foam again, noticing a low hum as the liquid base splashed, puffing up into foam on the ground. "Good," he complimented her. "Making sure it wasn't a one-off is smart, now-"
Holding out her left hand, she shot another jet of the blue fluid forward, keenly feeling her reserves dropping, even as she created something else with her right, throwing it into the stream, which hid it.
"It's not going to work a third-" Power Loader started to say. Whatever shield he was using to block the fluid, it only slowed her second creation, the flashbang leaping free of the stream of foam like a fish from a river. Its pin had a thin metal wire connected to it, which ran all the way back to Momo's palm.
"Oh," was all Power Loader said as Yaoyorozu closed her eyes, creating ear plugs already in place, as she pulled the pin, having created the device without any timing mechanism. Even then the flash still turned her vision red, and she could hear the muted explosion, opening her eyes to see her opponent struggling backwards, arms windmilling.
Yes! she thought darting forward, taser at the ready, and pushed herself to move as fast as she could, reaching the man and darting in. She made contact, but the second she did her opponent reacted, slamming into her with a robotic hand, hard, sending her flying back and through a wooden door, and for a moment her mind blacked out from the sudden pain.
But she forced herself to keep moving, clinically noting the sharp pain when she gasped for breath. Broken rib, she thought, getting up, her thoughts sluggish, but she was going to be a Hero, and something like this was not going to stop her. She'd kicked up a bit of dust, and she was thankful her opponent hadn't had time to seed this room with foam mines, or the fight would be done then and there.
She idly created a smoke grenade, set to start work as quickly as it emerged from her, the white non-irritating vapor giving her the cover she needed. Yaoyorozu knew that this would be her last move, with barely more than a tenth of her reserve left, and slowed by her injury as she was.
So she would have to make it count.
Unlatching the crosspiece of her costume, she shrugged off the top, as it would just get in the way. She couldn't consult her reference guide, but after her talk with Denki, she'd been practicing.
It was complex, and she had no idea if she'd gotten it right or not, but it took all of her remaining reserves to make, her Quirk pulling from the natural fats in her bloodstream to try and replenish itself, the enervating side-effect of over-using her Quirk enough to make her sway on her feet as she stumbled for the exit, only remembering at the last moment to pull up the top of her costume and re-attach the latch, so that Power Loader wouldn't notice anything amiss.
Both hands closed into fists, as she walked out of the smoke-filled room and back into the street, Power Loader having not moved, waiting for her. "Your helmet had a means of stopping my flash-bang, didn't it?" she asked, more for waiting out the clock than curiosity, every second wasted another second that Ida and Aoyama had to make it to the exit. They only had four minutes left before they ran out of time, but she had to have trust in her teammates, and do everything she could for them.
"Some," Power Loader agreed, no longer dragging his answers out. "Not enough to stop it completely. I am a Pro Hero, even if I work in Support. I still have my reflexes. That was very sneaky."
"When presented with a foe one cannot fight directly, one must fight subtly," she shrugged, wincing a little at the motion, and cast a glance backwards to the still smoke-filled room. Yes, the angle is right. "I must say, I have a fondness for canons," she said, seemingly at random, hoping this worked. "They have a certain beauty, simplicity, and elegance."
"Elegance?" the man echoed questioningly.
She nodded, "Everything, together for one purpose. My father thought it amusing. Until I got the ratios of the black powder correct," she smiled. It's not like he'd liked Auntie Himiko. And it hadn't escaped her notice that after they'd repaired the portrait of that awful woman, which she'd filled with holes, it'd been moved out of the hall and into the guest room her aunt used when she visited, so they no longer had to look at her every day.
"And, using them, one can secure victory in a single move," she stated, holding up her right hand to reveal a detonation switch, which she pressed.
From the window the shot came, shattering glass, even as Power Loader's eyes widened and he hunkered down, the low humming of his shield reaching a fever pitch as her shot streaked out towards him, then exploded into a ball of flame, the detonation rattling all of the windows around them, several cracking.
When the fire cleared, Power Loader stood, looking very unamused. "That wasn't a cannonball," he grit out. His skin was reddened, confirming her suspicions.
From her talk with Denki, after the Sports Festival, shields like what Mei had created could block anything but where very costly in terms of power. It was better to make a shield that could block out something specifically, like kinetic force, heat, or light, and making it variable. While more complicated, doing so extended its usability several times further. From the splotchy first-degree burns on the man's exposed chest, while it had blocked some of the heat, it hadn't been enough.
While she disliked injuring her teachers, this was a battle exercise, as her cracked rib could attest. Continuing their back and forth, buying more time, Momo couldn't help but grin wider, cocking her head in faux confusion. "Did I say it would be? No, while I prefer cannons, I have been learning to adapt." Three, two, one, she counted down, the smokescreen fading, revealing the multi-barrel rocket launcher she'd constructed, one tube out of sixteen smoking from the launch. "And as Denki says, sometimes what you really need is overwhelming firepower. Goodbye, Power Loader."
She opened up her left hand, revealing another detonator, and pressed it as the Pro Hero's eyes went wide, the other fifteen rockets firing in rapid order.
Even making another pair of earplugs, which hit her with another wave of tiredness, she watched as the first rocket hit, then the rest, the growing explosion shattering every window in the alley, the heat like staring into an open oven, and the force enough to send her stumbling backwards slightly, taking all her willpower to stay on her feet and keep the appearance of strength.
When the dust cleared, Power Loader was nowhere in sight, and the buildings behind him were gone, as were the buildings behind them, all collapsed into a mass of rubble.
The sound of concrete breaking made her turn around, where Power Loader dug up from underneath the street, breathing hard. She had no strength left, and wasn't the one with the real cuffs, the design too complex for her to create without a blueprint, and she turned a curious look her teacher's way. "What now?" she asked.
Power Loader just stared at her, shaking his head, idly putting a hand to his burns, having acquired a few more before he likely dug down to avoid the rest of her attack. "Kids these days," he sighed, as, distantly she heard the sounds of a canon firing, four muted fooms. "You lot never stayed in one place long enough for me to target you. Now you have. Good try, but not good enough to take me down."
"Take you down?" she asked, trying to eke out a few more precious seconds. "Whatever do you mean?"
The man gave the bright yellow handcuffs on her belt a significant look, which appeared to be the very cuffs that they were given to capture the teachers with, and shook his head again. "Whatever. I'll go get the others," he muttered, as she heard the whine of what sounded a bit like an incoming mortar shell, the man digging back underground.
Looking up, she saw it, along with a few more behind it, arcing through the air, the lead one thankfully exploding a hundred feet above her, showering everything with capture foam fluid. She was able to keep her face clear, but it covered her, as well as everything else around her up to her calf once it expanded. A quick calculation, if she was correct, would mean that four such shells would create a layer seven feet high, burying her completely in it. She could theoretically make the neutralizing compound to escape, but to get out would require a good seventh of her reserve, when she had, at most, one-hundredth of it left.
Thankfully, the foam was air permeable, and, with a sigh, she took a seat on the foam as the second mortar's load hit, covering everything in another layer, including her. Using her hands, and a microlayer of material, she still kept her face free, and closed her eyes with a sigh. "It's up to you now," she said, and settled in for a well-deserved nap.
As Always, the next three Chapters are up on !