Yo, I honestly didn't expect this much support for the story. Thanks to everyone who's been reading, commenting, and leaving reviews. I appreciate it a lot.
There was a small group throwing around some allegations, and I probably focused on that more than I should have. At the end of the day it's a minority, and I should be paying more attention to the people who are actually enjoying the chapters.
So thanks again to everyone supporting the story.
Without further ado.
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He moved.
Full sprint 217 kilometres per hour that his body could produce, every muscle fibre firing at once, the ground cracking under his feet as he launched forward. The air split around him. The sound hit a second after he was already there.
He caught the zero-pointer's foot with both hands above his head.
The impact drove him into the concrete up to his ankles. His knees buckled. His spine compressed. The weight was incomprehensible, not just mass but mechanical force, the entire output of a machine built to simulate a disaster pressing down on a pair of arms.
His muscles screamed. His joints ground against each other. His regeneration quirk fired immediately, repairing micro-tears in his shoulders and spine faster than they formed, but repair wasn't the problem.
He pushed CE into his arms. Both of them. As much as he could channel.
The shaking stopped. The ground stopped cracking. He was holding it. Barely. His arms locked, his core braced, the cursed energy forming a lattice through his muscle that turned flesh into something closer to steel. The zero-pointer's foot sat on his palms like the world's ugliest ceiling.
Then the robot pushed harder.
The force doubled. He felt it in his teeth. The concrete beneath his feet spiderwebbed out in a cracked cobweb pattern that ran three metres in every direction. His CE reinforcement was at his max.
His reserves were deep and his regen was feeding them back faster than he could drain them. But there was a ceiling on how much CE he could channel through his body at once. A bottleneck. Like trying to push a river through a garden hose.
He had the fuel. He didn't have the engine.
"Whatever your name is." His voice came out strained. "Can you get yourself out?"
The girl was to his right. Black hair stuck to her face with sweat and dust. Her legs were pinned under the slab. She was pulling, clawing, her quirk sparking against the edges of the concrete but not doing enough.
The zero-pointer heard him speak. Or maybe it didn't hear anything and the algorithm just decided this was the moment to commit. Either way, it pushed down with everything it had.
Ren's feet sank another three inches into the ground. His arms shook. The cobweb of cracks widened.
He couldn't hold this forever. His CE channel was maxed and the robot was stronger than him. Every second the force increased by a fraction and every fraction was a fraction he couldn't match. The math had an expiration date.
The cameras were on him. He could feel them. Every judge in the observation room was watching a kid hold up a zero-pointer with his bare hands and a quirk that was listed as Regeneration.
The gavel.
If the cameras saw a gavel materialise in his hand out of nothing, questions would follow. Questions he didn't want to answer.
But if he didn't use the gavel, the girl was going to die under a slab of concrete while he stood here being careful about his cover.
He thought about the alley. About the woman who ran while he was busy with her attacker. About the seven-year-old who couldn't remember.
He thought about the hollow.
And he thought about the fact that right now, in this moment, the calculation wasn't about warmth or emptiness or whether caring was worth the cost. A girl was going to die. He could stop it. The rest was noise.
*If anyone asks, it was in my coat pocket.*
The gavel appeared in his left hand. Dark metal. Solid weight. He adjusted his right arm to hold the full load of the zero-pointer's foot on one side. The strain almost buckled him. His right shoulder popped, dislocated, and his quirk snapped it back into place in about two seconds.
He looked at the slab pinning the girl's legs.
He threw.
The gavel left his hand with everything his left arm had. It hit the slab at an angle and the concrete exploded. Fragments sprayed outward, away from the girl. The gavel sank into the ground past the slab and kept going, burying itself in the earth along the trajectory.
The girl's legs were free. Scraped, bruised, bleeding, but free.
"Can you get out now?"
She tried to stand. Her legs folded. She grabbed at the rubble and pulled herself up and her knees gave again and she fell.
"No." Her voice broke. Tears cutting lines through the dust on her face. "My legs, they won't move."
The zero-pointer pushed again. Ren's feet went down another inch.
"Fuck me," he said.
Change of plans.
He couldn't hold this and carry her at the same time. He needed to push back hard enough to create a gap, grab her, and get clear before the foot came back down. One motion. One chance.
He pushed.
Everything he had. Every fibre, every unit of CE his body could channel through the bottleneck, every ounce of physical strength his quirk-enhanced frame could produce. He screamed.
The foot moved. Two inches. Three. Enough.
He let go.
Sprinted right. Scooped the girl off the ground. His right arm went under her knees, his left behind her back. The zero-pointer's foot came down behind him and the impact crater was where he'd been standing half a second ago.
Ten seconds later the alarm rang. The exam was over.
Ren stood in the street with the girl in his arms and the dust settling around them. His arms were shaking from the strain. His right shoulder ached where it had dislocated and healed. His shoes were gone, left in the concrete when he launched.
The sun was coming through a gap in the buildings. Late February sun, weak but there, casting long shadows across the ruined fake city. The light caught him from behind.
He looked down at her.
She was small. Dusty. Her black hair was a mess and her face was streaked with tears and concrete dust and there was blood on her shins from where the slab had scraped her.
She looked up at him.
"Are you alright?" he asked with a small smile. Not the one without warmth. A real one.
Her face went red. She turned her head away, fast, pressing her face against his chest.
"Y-yes. Thank you. I'm. Yes."
He set her down carefully on a piece of intact sidewalk. Recovery Girl would handle the legs. He nodded once and walked away before she could say anything else.
The gavel had dissolved. The hole in the ground where it landed was still there. Roughly gavel-shaped. Nobody was looking at it.
Nobody except a camera mounted on a building three blocks away that fed directly into the observation room.
---
In the observation room, Nezu was drinking tea.
The principal of UA High School was three feet tall, white-furred, and possessed a quirk called High Spec that made him, by most measurable standards, the most intelligent being on the planet. He had been watching the exam feeds with the mild interest of someone who had seen hundreds of entrance exams and expected nothing surprising from this one.
He was wrong.
The screen showing Battle Center D had caught his attention four minutes in when a student with a registered regeneration quirk punched a one-pointer into a building hard enough to crack the wall. He'd watched with increasing interest as the student walked through the arena destroying everything he touched with no visible quirk activation.
Then the zero-pointer sequence happened.
Nezu watched the student hold up the robot's foot. Watched the reinforcement of some kind, visible as a faint shimmer on the high-resolution feed. Watched the student produce an object in his left hand that hadn't been there a moment before. Watched him throw it at an angle that destroyed the concrete without touching the girl underneath.
Watched the object dissolve after impact.
Watched the hole it left in the ground.
Nezu set his tea down. Picked it up. Set it down again.
He pulled up a second screen. A file he'd been building for three months. The HPSC's Arbitrator case file, which he had access to because Nezu had access to everything.
Incident 218. A drug den in the 9th District. Four individuals found unconscious, quirkless, with no memory of the encounter. Standard Arbitrator profile. Except at this scene, there was an indentation in the concrete wall of the basement. The forensics team had photographed it, catalogued it, and filed it as "impact damage, unknown source."
The indentation was roughly the shape of a gavel.
Nezu pulled the forensic photograph onto one screen. On the other, he froze the exam footage on the frame where the student's thrown object had buried itself in the ground.
He looked at one. Looked at the other.
The shapes matched.
Nezu picked up his tea. Took a sip. Set it down.
The student's name was Asano Ren. Fifteen years old. Aldera Junior High. Registered quirk: Regeneration. Exam score: seventy-three villain points. Currently standing in the sun holding a girl he'd just saved, barefoot because he'd left his shoes embedded in concrete.
Nezu smiled. The small, sharp one that meant his brain had found a puzzle worth solving.
"Interesting," he said to nobody.
He closed both screens. Finished his tea. Made a note on his tablet that nobody else would ever see.
Then he went back to watching the exam.
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Cliffhanger-kun has been sealed for now… but don't relax too much. He might be waiting in the shadows of the next chapter. ;)
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