Chapter 24: Aizawa Questions His Life Choices
Aizawa had to re-read the email he had just received from Nedzu. He hired three new staff members: two teachers and a lawyer. Carmine Eagle, whom Aizaiwa was certain used to be Hawks, was teaching a new set of classes: "Fundamentals of Martial Combat" was a class that every hero student would be expected to pass to graduate with higher difficulties that could be taken as electives, "Civilian Self Defence" was a class that all non-hero students would be required to take as one of their PE credits. The rest of his time would be spent supplementing various heroics classes. Nedzu implemented the courses as a new security initiative. The other teacher was Blonde Fox, who was teaching multiple new language classes that UA hadn't offered previously: German, French, Russian, JSL, and ASL. Hizashi wanted to have sign language classes for years, but was too busy with English to teach the extra classes. The lawyer was one Midoriya Inko, one of Japan's most prolific and ruthless prosecutors.
Years of underground hero work gave him pretty good instincts. He could already anticipate the oncoming chaos. Then, his students started arriving. And a whole nother headache entered the room.
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Most of class 1A and their families have come through and set up their dorms. Today, the first-years' families would check in and get temporary visitor passes. Students were allowed to bring a maximum of four guests each. This usually meant parents and siblings… but then there were the self-proclaimed Outcasts. While Kaminari and Hatsumei brought along their parents and Kaminari's older cousin, the other three brought along some of their "friends from middle school."
That's how Aizawa had ended up in a staring contest with one of the most infamous assassins on the planet, second only to the feared Reaper. WHY had Nezu let this guy in!? Along with Lovro, there were three other assassins. The other assassins, Grip, Smog, and Gastro, had only shown up briefly; they ruffled Midoriya's hair, bumped fists with Shinsou, and had a short conversation with Takami before handing out parting gifts and leaving. The assassin and underground hero remained in the standoff for a few excruciating minutes before, suddenly, Lovro blinked and nodded. Then, the pro hero's heart nearly jumped out of his throat when the egregiously imposing figure walked toward him.
"You are Izuku's new teacher, correct?" Lovro spoke in a heavy Russian accent.
Aizawa nodded hesitantly.
"Hmm… You see the same potential I did. Between my protegee and myself, he has been taught everything I know. Though my protegee has taken more of a liking to the purple one." Lovro scanned the common room, and Aizawa copied the action. In the corner, Ms. Midoriya was fondly watching Takami, Jealvich, Midoriya, and Shinsou play-fighting with fake knives while Kaminari, Hatsumei, and Horibe worked together on some sort of robotic atrocity. The rest of class 1A were either in their rooms, exploring campus with their families, or staying firmly away from the group.
Aizawa couldn't come up with any words to respond, and if he was being honest, he was too scared to speak at the moment. The man standing casually next to him could probably kill him and half his students in under two minutes. Seriously, why did Nezu let this guy in!?
Much to the teacher's horror, Lovro seemed to sense the question bouncing through his head and raised an eyebrow at him. "Ah, you wonder why Nezu let assassin into the school, yes?" Lovro didn't wait for an answer. "He said it was supposed to be surprise… but I guess I can give you warning." And wasn't that concerning? "Nezu wants his staff and students prepared for anything." With that final, horribly ominous remark, Lovro walked away from Aizawa. The pro hero tracked his movements as he patted Shinsou's shoulder, gave Jealavich a meaningful nod, and handed small parcels to Takami and Midoriya. Then he went to stand silently next to Ms. Midoriya like a particularly unsettling statue.
The teacher wondered what all of the strange gifts the group had received from the various assassins were, but figured that he actually, really, vehemently didn't want to know.
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It didn't take another half an hour before all hell broke loose. Somehow, the group in the corner decided they needed to take up the whole common space with their antics now and drag anyone unlucky enough to be nearby into their indoor paintball match. It was an absolute mess. Rainbow colors of paint were everywhere and on everything, and somehow, they got the security AI to join them. The common room was now an all-out war zone with tipped-over furniture and empty paintball magazines strewn all over the floor. Aizawa had tied one of the tables to the corner of the roof with his capture weapon to make a makeshift sniper's nest. To the people on the floor, it looked like a demented spider web, but it was mostly safe from the chaos below while allowing Aizawa to make the occasional shot at one of his students.
The Outcasts now held a fortified position in the middle of the room, using a tupperware of Ms. Midoriya's cookies as the prize that motivated his students to participate in this lunacy. He would be lying if he said that those baked goods weren't the reason why he was also participating. Midoriya had brought in a batch of those cookies after midterms as thank you for being good teachers, which raised many questions about his previous schools, but back to the point, he got to try one, and now he, along with most of the staff, were addicted to the damn things.
A sudden tap on his shoulder had Aizawa whipping around, pistol raised, and coming face to barrel with a paintball gun. Hizashi, his dear, sweet husband, pressed a finger to his lips as he shuffled next to the tired pro. Hizashi was absolutely terrifying sometimes. Most people forget that just because quirks are one way doesn't mean their wielders can't do the opposite. Hizashi was cunning, sneaky, and smart, but most fell for his Present Mic persona, a true logical ruse. Then there was Tsukauchi, who could lie through his teeth without anyone processing that just because you can't lie to him doesn't mean he couldn't lie to you. Oddly enough, he can't lie to himself. Aizawa learned that interesting fact after a particularly rough case that left them trying to find answers from a god neither of them believed in at the bottom of a bottle.
Anyway, Hizashi, who was among the many staff members who fell victim to Ms. Midoriya's baked goods, bright, brilliant Hizashi was aiming a paintball shotgun at his beloved students. At this point, Aizawa was convinced that those damned cookies could spark a war. The blonde quickly signed to him, "Cover me, and I'll share the cookies with you," before leaping from the nest, painting Aishido, Kaminari, and Sero's backs neon-yellow. Aizawa activated his quirk to halt Bakugou's charge and shot a paintball at Tokoyami's center mass. Hizashi closed in on the fortress of couches and vaulted over the cushioned barrier to tackle Takami, holding the paintball gun to the avian's chest. Shinsou aimed to take out the intruder when a loud bang came from the corner. Aizawa dropped the table to swing from one of the light fixtures and intercepted his student. Now, with two hostages, the Outcasts yielded to the two pro heroes and handed over the tupperware.
The duo made an expeditious repeat, but before the elevator doors closed on their ascent, Aizawa glared at his paint-covered class. "You have three hours to make this room spotless." How had he and his husband ended up in a paintball firefight with twenty-two teenagers, his two new coworkers, and the AI who controls the security turrets over two dozen cookies?
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Aizawa, for once, wasn't the one having an aneurysm over his students' ludicrous behavior. It was also the first time he'd ever seen Ms. Joke so shocked that she couldn't crack a joke about the situation. Today was the provisional licensing exam. It wasn't the start of the exam when his students broke off into groups of about five, or when the Outcasts group ambushed her students, taking out the second-years within the first two minutes of the exam. It wasn't even when his class took charge of the rescue operation with a textbook setup compliant with the procedures EMTs followed, courtesy of the new curriculum. No, it was when Gang Orca burst in as the mock villain for the exam, and how the Outcast group reacted. Within four minutes, Gang Orca was dropped by that freaky technique Midoriya used in the final exams and seems to have perfected by now. The sidekicks playing henchmen were taken out by rubber-bullet suppressing fire and electrified whip cracks courtesy of Shinsou and Kaminari.
This exam was far more difficult than previous ones, likely because the HPSC still had no idea who took down the League and eliminated their leader. Aizawa had his suspicions about that, a particular encounter in a hospital hall before the incident coming to mind. The Commission assumed it must have been a different, more powerful group of villains. It was so illogical. It was clearly the work of trained assassins or international heroes, but whatever Aizawa wasn't attached to them at all, so they could do whatever they pleased as long as they didn't bother him about it. They were probably still reeling from losing their "precious" Number Three, too. If Aizawa was being honest, he figured it was only a matter of time before the corrupt bureaucracy imploded.
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SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! Aizawa thought in time with his pounding feet. He hadn't been this terrified since his school days, and judging by her pace, Nemuri wasn't fairing much better. This must have been what Lovro's warning was about. The entire school had been turned into a warzone. The campus was crawling with assassins wielding paint-cover weapons of all kinds from rubber knives to paintball guns to one guy he saw with a fricken scythe. A good handful of the assassins were his students' age. Where did Nezu find these kids!?
The goal was simple: don't get tagged with paint… well, it was simple in theory. In practice, it had pro heroes and students alike leaping out of windows, diving under furniture, and/or using each other as human shields. It was complete anarchy. For some god awful reason, the Outcast crew, his husband, the security AI, and Ms. Midoriya were all part of the hunting party. He found out about that last one when he tried hiding in staff dorms and was intercepted by the petite woman and the fucking paintball minigun she rested on her hip. That's how he lost Nemuri.
Bakugou was the first in his class to get hit. Midoriya reached from his desk behind the blonde and traced a line of green paint across his throat, starting the whole event. Next came a spray of purple paint that eliminated twelve other students from the hunt. Then his husband hung upside down from one of the vents and started aiming at any of the students that remained, and that was Aizawa's cue to start running.
During his mad dash through the hall, he saw Vlad King get jumped by a kid with red hair that jammed… was that a wasabi packet!? up the hero's nose. Then, like straight out of a cyberpunk thriller movie, the walls began to open up, revealing at least twenty turrets in this hallway alone with really big guns. That was when the underground hero went for the nearest window, smashing through it and using a nearby tree to swing from using his scarf, Sero pulling a similar move. Unfortunately for his student, he was shot in the back by a blond girl wielding a gun that looked oddly similar to one of Shinsou's. Through the windows, he could see a blue-haired boy (or was that a girl?) take on the Big Three along with a green-haired girl with a similar hairstyle to the boy and another teen that he couldn't quite make out. He saw another student get hit by a baseball thrown by a kid yelling something along the lines of "For Koro-Sensei!" and yet another student get jumpscared by a creepy-looking teen.
Then Aizawa tried hiding in the staff dorms and well… let's just say they were firmly off limits. By now, it was clear that the only way to safety was to escape campus grounds. The gates were too obvious and had a ton of turrets that the security AI could use to pelt him into the dirt with paint. His best bet would be to scale the wall. There was one area behind one of the training fields that had a blind spot in the security cameras. He found it during his early years in teaching to get away with sleeping during his off periods before he realized that Nezu couldn't care less when he slept as long as he got all his work done and was present for all the classes he taught. He was almost there when something caught his shoulder, spattering red paint across his face. One of Takami's feathers whizzed past him, red paint lacing its edges.
"Wow, you almost escaped! Good job, you're the only one who's made it this far!" The blonde chirped from where he hovered about eight meters behind him. "Well, I'll let you know that the staff who have been caught are gathering in the teacher's lounge!" And with that remark, the feathered hero soared off.
About twelve minutes of walking and a five minute climb up the size of UA's main building (like hell he's walking through that shit show), Aizawa finally made it to the teacher's lounge. He flopped lazily on one of the couches and groaned.
Sitting in a nearby chair, Yagi chuckled. "I see you're the last to join us."
That comment made Aizawa take stock of the room, and surely enough, there were the rest of his coworkers who weren't in on the slaughter. Some of them looked worse off than others. Midnight was drenched in mint-green paint, Vlad had a puffy red nose and watering eyes, and Powerloader's hair was singed. Then there was Yagi, who had slits of gray paint between his eyes, across his throat, and on his chest over his heart.
The soon-to-retire pro caught his questioning glance and nodded solemnly. "I was the second person eliminated after Young Bakugou. Lovro got me at nearly the same time while I was enjoying some tea." Yagi rubbed at the now-dry paint on his neck with a small frown. "To think I'm so vulnerable now… and now that the greatest threat to the students and Japan has been squarely dealt with. I think it might be time for me to retire soon. I should speak to Nezu about this."
Aizawa nodded his agreement. Having Lovro eliminate Yagi so quickly and thoroughly was probably meant to serve as a wake-up call to the Number One. Though that raises concerns about how the masses will feel about losing the Number One and Three Heroes in the same year. God, that's going to be an absolute mess.
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In the midst of cackling over the utter chaos the former 3E and their assassin friends were causing, Nedzu sneezed.