Chapter Ninety-Three

It was late, but late nights were nothing new to Shota Aizawa. That said, Eraserhead could've done without the early mornings, needing to ride herd on his kids while they pushed themselves to their limits. They had put their trust in the Pros, most not realizing how close they were to injury by over-exerting their Quirks, doing exactly what was asked of them, so it was up to the adults to make sure they didn't hurt themselves.

Glancing at Pixie-Bob, he had to note that some of them were doing better at that than others.

Checking his phone, he noted they were supposed to start the meeting eight minutes ago, and tried not to sigh. The Pussycats had trickled in right before the deadline, and had taken seats at the table, Vlad had arrived with Aizawa ten minutes early. Icicle had been there when they'd entered, the ice-user dozing in her seat, and Kyūdō had arrived exactly on time, the man's Quirk in action, which just left. . .

The door opened, with no one in sight, but the quick, shuffling footsteps suggesting their missing member had arrived. With a heave, the short, dirty, round man heaved himself onto a chair.

"You're late, Mole," Aizawa noted.

"Eh, my apologies," the vibration sensor replied with a sleazy smile, something Shota didn't trust in the slightest. "Ze forest, it is not my preferred locale. It's zo easy, to get lost."

"Kind of a faux-paw to not fur-miliarize the place you're trying to guard," Ragdoll taunted the other man.

Turning his insincere smile the greenette's way, the half-European sneered, "I suppose that's on me, for not having a Quirk that just feeds you everything you need. Then again, I've heard you've had some. . . performance issues, haven't you? Quirk not what, working like it used to? I've heard it happens, when you age."

The pussycat's teasing grin turned nasty, not taking the slight well. "Heard about that, did ya? But you hear all sorts of-"

"Ragdoll," Mandalay snapped tiredly, "Not the time."

The scanner pouted, folding her arms with a Hmph, and Aizawa shook his head. The woman's Quirk gave her the ability to know people's weaknesses, and she couldn't help but poke them, usually in ways so personal her comments seemed innocuous to others. It made for good psychological resistance training, but only for those professional enough to handle it.

Kyūdō cleared his throat, the tall, well-built older man changing the topic. "I believe we were here to talk about our ongoing assignment?" Turning towards Shota, he inquired, "We've been here a week without issue, and there hasn't been any hint of Villain activity. Are we really required?"

Icicle yawned, stretching pale limbs, "There hasn't been a hint of action, Eraser. The way you talked about this, I expected something to happen by now." The woman summoned a thin spike of ice, twirling her namesake with practiced fingers. "I've just been listening to squirrels through these things. Well, that and my minions talking about the stupidest things," she complained, flicking the icicle with her other hand for emphasis, the woman able to detect vibrations through them.

"We are getting paid, so I have no problem," Mole shrugged.

"Some of us like hot showers," the ice user shot back. "And some of us really need them."

Taking an experimental sniff, the short, clearly unwashed man replied, "Oh, that is you? Perhaps you could use our host's facilities while you're here, if you're such a dirty girl."

"On topic, please," Kyūdō prompted, with just the right degree of forcefulness to stop the bickering without giving offense, then he turned back to look at the others, only the slight glow of his eyes revealing he was using his Quirk. Kyūdō's ability, Perfect Action, let him perform any given task he envisioned, if it were physically possible. It was something that, while useful, had kept him as a C-tier hero, unable to handle any Villain with a truly dangerous ability. Addressing the UA staff, the man inquired, "Perhaps a hint of what's going on here? Training students, obviously, but something more? Surely, if you are worried about information leaks, with us already on-site there is no more danger?"

"Sorry, but no," Aizawa disagreed flatly. "You don't need to know that."

Beside him, Vlad nodded, backing him up, "Nezu was clear on this fact, and I know he's a better planner for these sorts of things than either of us are."

"He's also our boss," the nullifier added, repressing a sigh when it was clear the three pros they'd contracted didn't seem to care. He could understand the Chimera's strategy of contracting a number of smaller agencies to work in tandem, as it was far easier to slip a spy into the ranks of a larger group like Endeavor's, only a few of them prioritizing in protection making that group even easier to compromise, but there was also a reason why these people were all small-time. These three were, for better or worse, the best of those they'd hired, and were themselves in charge of the three groups of Pros maintaining a perimeter.

Icicle sighed, "Well, at least are the kiddos having a good time? I heard there was a bit of a destruction derby at the lake."

Mandalay shot Aizawa a questioning look, and he nodded, as this was fine to share, the brunette smiling, "After two days of pushing themselves, we thought we'd give them a day off. They had a great time, even if things got a little out of hand at the end," she stated, glancing Pixie-Bob's way, who was finding her own paws very interesting.

"Out of hand?" Kyūdō questioned. "Was anyone hurt?"

The unofficial leader of the Pussycats winced, "One student was, but-"

"Was it Denki?" Mole interrupted, with a toothy grin.

"It was," Tiger noted, frowning. "But that is nothing to be excited over."

The short pro glanced around, and realized everyone was staring at him. "Sorry, I apologize. I saw his loss at the Sports Festival, and he seems the type to get hurt trying to do too much. And, well, while the green haired one isn't that short, it is always fun for me to watch the big guy get taken down by the little one." The four-foot-tall man shrugged, "I'm sure you can see why, at least for me."

Kyūdō frowned, but nodded. "As the Americans would say, 'David and Goliath' matches have a certain appeal." Looking to the rest of the table, he added, "And Young Kaminari was clearly not that injured, as I'm sure Mole knows, or else the boy would've been taken away for medical treatment."

"He was that injured, but he's got a healing factor," Mandalay disagreed. "But I can see why you'd think that was funny if you didn't know, Mole."

"So he can be injured, and he can keep going?" the small man checked, the Pussycat nodding. "Well isn't that something, wish more had that."

Vlad snorted, the self-hemokinetic agreeing, "I certainly wouldn't say no to it."

"But other than him everyone was fine," the telepath quickly reassured the others. "And he was fine in a couple hours, right back to training the next day."

"Not bad," Icicle shrugged. "Anything else? Scary stories? Fleeting summer romances? Cook offs?"

"We just did the first. And maybe the second's happening," Pixie-Bob gossiped. "'Greeny' seems to be wooing two girls at the same time, and they're both okay with it."

"Impressive," Kyūdō nodded with an indulgent paternal smile. "That requires a skill beyond even me."

"And Kaminari and Ashido are already an item," the blonde continued.

Mole scowled, but, before he started sounding like Mineta, Aizawa loudly cleared his throat. "I don't believe that this conversation is relevant to our task. Is there anything your groups need?"

"My contingent could use a few more ration packs. One of mine has a higher-than-normal caloric requirement and thought it was already known," Kyūdō noted.

"It was," Eraserhead replied, "But Nezu budgeted things assuming Pinwheel wouldn't be using his Quirk without cause. Mandalay?" he requested, as this was their operation.

The brunette smiled, "We'll send you some extras."

Icicle lifted an eyebrow, "Could we get some booze? It'd make the off hours go by faster."

Vlad shook his head, "That's a negatory, ma'am. You're being paid for your off hours too, which makes them just 'less on' hours."

"Can't blame a girl for trying," she shrugged. "How about you, Mole? I'd say soap, but. . ."

"You need it all for yourself," Mole nodded understandingly, "and can't drink to escape the smell. As a Pro, I won't stop you from getting what you need." At the pale woman's harsh look, he just smiled toothily again, "But my people are fine. We prepared for our post, unlike some others."

That got rolled eyes from the other two, but passed without comment. "Anything else?" Pixie-Bob asked. "We've got supplies, and Eraserhead's paying." Aizawa grunted unhappily, but nodded, all three asking for a few small things the Pussycats had on hand, wrapping up the meeting, but Kyūdō had one last request.

"Would it possible to meet them before they leave?" the older man inquired, appearing perfectly polite. "If something is going to happen, it won't while we're all concentrated, and it would show them that you have taken their safety seriously, Eraserhead, even if they did not know we were there until that moment."

"And them possibly taking some of you up on your offers for internships in thanks has nothing to do with it, I'm sure," Vlad pointed out.

"Ha! He's got you there, old timer," Icicle teased.

Shrugging, one hand going to the back of his head in embarrassment, Kyūdō replied, "That would be a secondary benefit. I am not lying about wanting to meet them, however."

"Sorry," Aizawa started to reply, "But-

"Come on Eraserhead, don't be a sourpuss," Ragdoll interrupted, turning a mischievous grin towards the charismatic older man. "We'll tell you so you can come visit the kittens!" she promised, waving them away. "Now go back to prowling around!"

The three Pros might've had trouble being professional, but they could certainly read the room, quickly vacating before Aizawa could say anything. After they left, however, he turned his flat stare towards the green-haired woman. "Nezu was clear that they not be told about our future plans. That is why they're on contract for two days after the students leave."

"Kyūdō wasn't wrong, if anything happens they'll all be here," Mandalay argued. "And they're all as out of contact as the students are."

"She still should not have said that," Tiger noted dangerously, before shaking his head, "But what's done is done."

Shota didn't like it, but trying to reverse course now would just make things worse, and might even lead to the Pros trying to subtly make contact on their own. And, perhaps he was being too paranoid. Kaminari's rubbing off on me, he thought ruefully. Though, in turn, the boy had finally started to relax. Despite the Pussycats efforts in some cases. He was going to let that lie, but since they were not being professional. . .

"While we're here, I've got a question," he remarked, turning to put his full attention on Pixie-Bob. "Why did you go so hard on the last group yesterday? If anything, you should've done so for Midoriya's group."

The blonde woman froze under his gaze. "Well, they had more time to prepare, so-"

"She thought Kaminari and Katuski needed a loss," Tiger rumbled.

The Terrakinetic shot her teammate a betrayed look, "Yawara! Eraserhead didn't need to know that."

However the large man remained unmoved. "Honesty and forthrightness is the core of a heroic disposition!" he chided.

She winced, hanging her head. "He built a plane!" she whined. "Who does that? And he's just so. . . stuck up!"

"There are many things I could call Denki Kaminari," Aizawa noted calmly, "but stuck up is not one of them."

"You have to admit, Eraser," Mandalay argued, "He's kind of arrogant. Did you know he told me he could take me in a fight?" she laughed, Pixie-Bob and Ragdoll laughing along with her.

He didn't.

Neither did Vlad or Tiger.

"Eraser?" the brunette questioned, glancing between the three of them

"How, exactly did he say that?" the teacher inquired seriously.

The Telepath blinked, "I, uh, he said that rescue was my specialty, but fighting was his, and training was neither of ours. He was right about some of your students needing different training, but that was more because he knew them than anything else."

The nullifier released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Good. That's. . . good," he stated, the boy using that statement to set up a peer relationship, and not as a threat. He thought Kaminari had been improving, but he'd been wrong before. "And Mandalay? He's right."

The flat, disbelieving look she sent him met his own flat, uncompromising one, and lost. "Come on, you're telling me you missed Tiger beating him up and down the training ground today?" she argued, looking to her teammate. "Right, Tiger?"

The large man, however, shook his head. "He was training his hand to hand, and his Atlas Quirk, with me, and learning at an impressive rate, but the boy's Quirk is Electrification, and he never used that. More than that, when I truly surprised him, the young man would grab at his neck for the necklace he left hanging on a branch."

That caused Shota's eyebrows to raise slightly. He took it off on his own? "Don't think of Kaminari as a student," the tired man advised. "Really all of my class aren't normal students, unlike class 1-B. No offense, Vlad."

His fellow teacher shrugged, "I'm not exactly happy 'bout your kids hogging the spotlight, Eraser, but I would rather mine get experience in a safer way."

"That makes two of us," the nullifier readily agreed, turning back to the other four. "There's been more incidents than what was reported, and Kaminari took what happened worse than the others. Treat him like a rookie Pro, back from a tour of America. The cities, but not one of the exclusion zones."

The female Pussycats all gasped, while Tiger's brows knit. "Is he a danger?" the man asked softly.

Aizawa shook his head, hoping he was correct. "No, and this? This has been good for him. Until someone decided to push him, but that helped too in a way. The boy got between me and something meant to kill All-Might, and gave himself a grand-mal seizure to avoid an instantly lethal blow. Then he led some of class 1-A to fight a terrorist group that was holding I-Island hostage, taking sniper-fire to protect them. And you might've seen how his fight with Midoriya went. Everything we've seen about the boy suggests he will escalate until he wins, or he's dead, and he keeps on adding tools to his arsenal to make sure it's the first. If something happens, Pixie-Bob, Vlad, you're the only two that might be able to hold him off while I try and talk him down."

The white-haired man beside him frowned, "But you used your Quirk against Kaminari in his Final. I saw the footage."

"He let me believe I had," Aizawa replied, smirking a little at the memory. "A rational deception of his. It also meant that he didn't trust me enough to make sure he had an ace in the hole against me, but he's started to relax. He's also immune to Midnight's powers, though we haven't had him do a broad-spectrum test, so suppressants might work. With him also being immune to mind-based Quirks, like your two's," he noted, nodding to the scanner and the telepath, "he wasn't being arrogant, Mandalay. He was being accurate."

"Even then," Pixie-Bob argued, "isn't that a little much?"

Shota started to reply but paused, looking to Vlad for his opinion. Nezu had cleared them to brief the Pussycats at their own discretion, and it appeared that Aizawa had been right to hold this back before, but now might be the time.

The hemokinetic considered his unspoken question, then nodded, turning to the Pussycats. "The USJ attack, the incident at I-Island, and the attack on Hosu were all by the same group, but they've not been officially connected. The security here is because we worried that this would be their next target, and we wished to help the students gain strength away from prying eyes. Needless to say, you are not to tell the others about this," he declared, giving a hard look to the Pros.

"We'll keep paw-sitively silent on this!" Pixie-Bob nodded, Tiger and Mandalay following suit, the blonde glancing Ragdoll's way. "Right?"

The green-haired woman clearly didn't want to agree, but as the rest of her team levelled their admonishing gazes on her, she rolled her eyes. "Fine! I'll not tell any tails."

"And tomorrow's activity?" Aizawa prompted, looking to the terrakinetic.

"Hey, I can learn from hiss-tory," Pixie-Bob replied, smiling at her own pun. "I'll be just as hard on him as I am on the other kittens, no more, no less. But you sure he's gonna be fine?"

The nullifier smiled, "Don't worry. When it comes to his fellow students he holds back. Everyone else? That's a different story."

MHA

An unexpected benefit of Regeneration?

Decreased need for sleep.

Everyone else got a full eight hours, sleeping the deep sleep of the exhausted, but after five I was already waking up, in that odd, in-between state where I could've got a few more if I wanted, like I had last time.

This time, however, I had a new Quirk to train.

Momo and Mina's were incredibly obvious when used, but Hagakure's was the definition of subtle, allowing me to wake early, get ready, and take a seat outside our shared room to start trying to bend light. Starting with clearing my mind, I reached out for the power, something that I was only starting to understand how to do now that I had five of them, but even then it took me a few minutes as I sparked, dripped, and, for one nerve-wracking moment, glowed, before I got down how to pull on Invisibility, and only Invisibility, which let me move onto the next step.

Actually using the damn thing.

Without an audience, I could put more pressure on the Quirk than I could surrounded by people in front of a campfire. There was a lamp above me attached to the cabin, and I could feel the light it gave off, faintly, but only within a few inches of my body. Then again, having seen how the original user of this Quirk worked, I knew that range would grow with time and use.

Okay, step one, invisibility.

Doing so for my entire body seemed too ambitious for my first step, so I held out a hand, focusing on it, but trying to control the light around my palm was like trying to grab onto water.

Wait, remember how she talked about it. She doesn't use the light as individual photons, individual 'units' of light, she thinks in streams, I considered, imagining the light that bounced off my hand instead akin to placing it in a stream, the light moving around it instead, flowing back to continue past my fingers, filling the 'void', and. . . my limb darkened slightly.

. . . Not what I wanted, but, I was definitely doing something.

Holding it up, and turning it back and forth, I had to constantly model the flow, though it made a certain degree of sense in an instinctual way. It was just. . . darker, until I turned myself around, at which point my solid looking hand suddenly appeared ghostly, and I could dimly see the lamp that was behind it, when the limb should've blocked it entirely.

Turning it back and forth, it was still a little translucent, but, turning my back on the lamp, it was solid once more, just seeming a bit darker, and. . .

I'm an idiot.

I was moving light, yeah, but light wasn't water, and it didn't just move one way. Yes, light was coming from the lamp, but it was also coming from the moon that was slowly encroaching on the tree line, while in the other direction, the first light of dawn was also just starting to break, casting another set of light rays, and then the light from all three was bouncing off of everything else, in every direction. . .

Ugh.

So, holding up my hand, turning so the light was coming from behind me, I did what I was doing before, which from my perspective just darkened it, but from the other direction would turn it translucent. Okay, now, the feeling was fainter as there was less light coming from that direction, but I did the same thing to whatever was coming from whatever was bouncing up to hit my palm before it reached me, which was another layer of complexity, so. . .

And then I could see through my hand, the trees on the other side readily apparent. However, pulling my hand back, as soon as I looked at from another angle, it was solid once more, just a little bit darker than it was before.

Frowning, I copied the process for the left and right sides of my hand, which was even harder, causing me to try and juggle all four, which worked. . . assuming I looked at it dead on, but, turning myself around it, my hand oscillated between shaded and ghostly.

How.

The Fuck.

Does Toru do this?

Well, the answer was easy: A shit-ton of practice, as I was currently using it in its 'just manifested' form, at the level Hagakure had when she was six. That said, the Quirk was a bit easier to use just from this practice, the slight headache from trying to hold the four-way flow in place slowly fading, and not because I was healing, but because the strain was lessening, as Hagakure's Quirk, like Mina's, wasn't a stockpiling one so I could just pound my metaphorical head against it until I made progress.

I hadn't really done that with Mina's Acid Quirk, because of how distinctive it was, but, if I got this one down, people wouldn't see me using Hagakure's Quirk.

Literally.

But, more than that, her Quirk wasn't really Invisibility, it was Light Control, though she hadn't really done anything with that, having listened to the adults on what her power was 'supposed to be', and just running with that.

And, unlike her, with my Regen, I could be dumb with it!

Which is why I was doing this here, in the dark, and without telling Mina, which. . . I probably shouldn't do, but if, even at full blast, I could only get my hand down to eighty-percent opacity, this should be fine.

Probably.

Well, Science isn't done by waiting around, I thought, knowing at least Mei would understand, grabbing the light around me and shoving it directly into my eyes!

FuckShitBright! Were my first thought, as I blinked, but, a moment later, as the tears left my eyes, I looked around, the dim duskiness of twilight lit up like it was mid-afternoon.

My vision as 'Denki' was practically perfect, as opposed to my 'nearly legally blind' old self, but now it sharpened even further, allowing me to, not really zoom, but focus on fine details even more than I could before. After several minutes of doing nothing but looking around, I thought to feel out my new Quirk as I was doing it, finding I was subconsciously making modifications to the flow that I didn't realize I was doing, which made me focus on what I was doing, which promptly made me lose control of the entire thing, my vision going blurry, then flickering back and forth nauseatingly as I tried to manually control the process, and failed, the centipede's dilemma once more in full force.

Closing my eyes, I stopped focusing on focusing, which was easier said than done, until I was back to zero, and, almost meditatively, I opened them again, seeing the area around me, and, looking at a tree, the details of its bark sprang into stark contrast.

The next problem came when I tried to reset to 'zero', my vision randomly hyper-focusing on anything that caught my eye, and I sighed, having to purposefully let the 'focus' use of it fade, finding my eyes ached a little as I did so, but the feeling was off, and, if I had to guess, it was my Quirk that was a bit sore, not my physical eyes, which could just be Regenerated.

Night vision is good, I told myself. Actually, night vision is great. But. . . was there a physical manifestation?

Without even thinking about it, I summoned my phone, turning on the camera, and after turning down the brightness, realized that the answer was. . . kinda. My eyes shone a little, seeming to glow with inner light when really it was just concentrated light, but I could roll with this.

I already glowed a little when I tapped OfA, so this just fit in with that.

Actually. . .

Turning on that Quirk, I started to spark with power, but the light coming off of me was. . . oddly slippery, and hard to control. However, when it bounced off something else, that 'backsplash' I could work with, brightening the area a little, telling me that, even if I was in absolute darkness, I should still be able to see by making my own light.

. . . Or I could just make my own light.

Holding up a hand, I called on my actual Quirk, and the-Fuckthat'sbright!

Okay, looking directly at an electric arc with night-vision eyes was stupid. But, again, that's why I was doing this alone.

Blinking away tears, and pulling back on the. . . degree of 'night vision', the area around me darkening, I sparked again, and, no, pulling that light to me just made the arc eye-wateringly bright again.

. . . Because I didn't need 'light', I needed the light that had bounced off of everything around me already to see what was around me.

Because that was how vision worked.

So I needed a source of light that I couldn't see to light everything up and use that.

Like a flashlight.

Like the one I was holding.

And I was once again reminded that smart didn't equal wise. Intelligence was like horsepower in a car, in that if you used it correctly you could go far, and you could go fast, but incorrectly used it allowed you to crash really really hard.

Flicking on my phone's light, and. . . yep.

That helped me see.

Shocker.

Turning up the 'Night Vision', I could gain even greater understanding of my surroundings, the sight odd, like it was bright sunlight where the light shone, which shifted to a cloudy day around that, and then late afternoon past that. Flicking off the light, I paused, realizing I'd summoned my phone to the place we weren't allowed to have phones.

. . . yeah, maybe I needed more sleep than I thought I did.

Could I de-summon it?

Scrolling through the apps, there was no 'stow' function, but, then again, there wasn't a 'call' function either. Well, there literally was, but not that kind of call.

Tossing my phone into the trees, I focused internally, trying once more to summon it and-

Yep. Back in my hand.

Could I use it as ammo for my railgun? I wondered, which. . . was kind of nuts, and would really cause more problems than it would solve, but was something to look into later.

Hurling it away once more, I called it again trying to focus on the feeling, getting a glimmer of. . . something, as I felt it in my hand once more. Doing so, again and again, it was incredibly fleeting, and didn't really feel the same way using any of my Quirks did, which made it a lot harder to pin down, but I had time.

Soon enough, I could feel that mental 'tab', a bit like being able to pick out a single tooth in my mouth outside of the fact that I had teeth. Or, more accurately, a single ridge on the roof of my mouth from all the others, only able to make it pulse for a moment underneath my mental tongue, and, well, I was stretching the metaphor, but it still worked if you squinted. At the roof of your mouth. In essence, the part of me that I found had been part of me for so long I didn't realize it was something strange.

And, once I had it, instead of pressing it I instead pulled and-

Between one moment and the next, my phone vanished.

Nice.

Summoning and de-summoning, discovering a twelve-second cooldown on the process as I did so, it was odd, it seemed like the space just sort of folded, resolving into my phone, or having it disappear, but the light coming from me, and which bounced off the phone, reacted oddly with the device as it came and went.

But not unfamiliarly.

It was, in many ways, exactly like Toru's power worked, though from how the light moved, it was covering something up. Dismissing my phone caused a similar thing to happen, the light moving around the phone a fraction of a second before it actually disappeared.

Pulling it back and pushing it away, I could feel the effect out, which told me that I could probably use Toru's power to strip off the illusion, or at least suppress it a little. The problem was that it came and went so fast, it'd be like some martial art 'take the cricket from my hand' bullshit, except, by holding the phone just right, I could put my metaphorical hand right over my target.

A couple more rotations, and I was ready, holding Invisibility tight, and then. . . NOW!

The phone in my hand didn't disappear, but instead a glowing gateway formed, full of writhing, impossible, living colors, and the portal moved, enveloping the phone in the same pattern that space normally 'folded', vanishing in an instant.

I stared, as my Defenses rang like a struck bell, and I heard something shift behind me, turning to see that the branch that had been above me had lost all of its color, the closest leaves crumbling to dust. Watching, the rest of the branch slowly regained its previous hue, the half-dead leaves springing back to life before my eyes, though not as fully green as they were a moment before, and the pale dust was just that, dust.

Reaching over, my Defenses didn't ping when I touched it, so at least I hadn't created anything eldritchly toxic, but. . . I was pretty sure those colors I'd seen in that portal didn't exist, and there was something inside that gate that'd greedily reached out and took a. . . a sip of the real world while it could.

I had the image of a car made of brains, with my ass as the crash-test dummy, slamming into a wall that looked kinda like my phone.

Nodding to myself, I stood, and did what I should've done half an hour ago.

I went back to bed.

AN: Next Four Chapters are up on and Subscribestar, as usual!