The announcement echoed through every speaker in Training Ground Beta, and Izuku's eyes locked onto the building in front of him.
Five stories of reinforced concrete stood between his position and the mock weapon. He'd memorized the blueprint during his planning minutes, tracing every hallway and stairwell in his head, and every single ground level route led straight into Bakugo's open hands.
The stairs are a death trap, he thought as his gloved fists tightened at his sides. Bakugo's going to be watching every access point downstairs. We need to come in from a direction he can't predict.
He turned to Ochako. She was already looking at him with her chin tilted up, and even though a faint blush still colored her cheeks from the plan he'd whispered to her earlier, her brown eyes were burning with determination.
"Ready?" he asked in a low voice.
"Ready," she answered with a firm nod.
Izuku stepped in behind her.
"Just like we planned."
Ochako closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath through her nose, bracing herself for what she was about to do in front of every single one of her classmates watching the monitors, her hands hovering at her sides for a moment.
There goes my reputation.
Izuku closed his hands firmly around Ochako's breasts.
[ZERO GRAVITY, OCHAKO URARAKA] [BOOST MODE ACTIVE]
[PRECISION VECTOR CONTROL -> ENHANCED]
[GRAVITATIONAL INVERSION -> ACCESSIBLE]
Holy crap, Izuku thought as the information flooded his mind. She's got a new ability? She can make things heavier too?
"Ochako," he whispered against her ear, tightening his grip slightly. "You ready?"
"N-ngh...!" Ochako's knees wobbled for a second before she pressed her fingertips together with desperate urgency. "L-let's go!"
The asphalt dropped away from under their boots. The two of them started rising in a slow, unstoppable climb up the side of the building, Izuku plastered to Ochako's back with his hands still firmly occupying her generous chest.
Her face redder than Izuku's own costume, Ochako kept her eyes locked straight ahead, refusing to think about the fact that her classmates were watching this on high definition screens.
For the mission, she repeated to herself over and over. For the mission. For the... focus, Ochako, focus, focus!
Inside the monitor room, the reaction was immediate and catastrophic.
"WHAT?!" Mineta's shriek cut through the entire monitor room. "NO! NO, NO, NO! IT SHOULD'VE BEEN ME! IT SHOULD'VE BEEN ME UP THERE WITH URARAKA-SAN! WHY, GOD, WHY DID YOU GIVE EVERYTHING TO MIDORIYA?!"
"Shut up, goblin." Kyoka jabbed an elbow into his shoulder to shove him out of her personal space.
Momo, standing a few steps away with her hands folded neatly in front of her skirt, was watching the screen with a deeply composed expression, her back straight, her chin level, and a very faint but incriminating flush spreading across her cheeks.
Izuku-kun is using his Quirk, her brain reasoned. Of course. Given the urgency of the operation and Uraraka-san's lipid distribution...
A small shiver went through her chest at the involuntary memory of her own Quirk reading at Izuku's hands.
Purely scientific, she reminded herself firmly. Midoriya-kun is a consummate professional.
Meanwhile, in the center of the room, All Might had a single bead of sweat tracing down his temple, and his smile had developed a small, unmistakable twitch at the corners.
"Ah... well... YOUNG HEROES, THIS IS...!" He cleared his throat loudly. "THIS IS CERTAINLY AN UNEXPECTED OPENING MANEUVER!"
He rubbed the back of his neck with one of his enormous hands.
"I'm sure... I'm absolutely sure... there must be a perfectly reasonable tactical explanation for whatever young Midoriya is currently doing to young Uraraka..." He coughed aggressively into his fist. "Yes! A distraction maneuver! A combat strategy designed to catch the villain team off guard by psychologically shocking the enemy! Brilliant thinking, young Midoriya!"
Kirishima's fists slammed down on the armrests of his seat.
"HOLY CRAP, ALL MIGHT IS RIGHT!" His eyes were shining with admiration. "Midoriya is grabbing Uraraka's boobs in front of everyone just to confuse the enemy! That's, like, next level commitment to the mission! THAT'S SO MANLY!"
Kyoka and Mina turned their heads slowly to look at him with expressions of pure disbelief.
"I c-can't believe he bought it," Kyoka muttered.
"I can," Mina sighed. "That's the problem. I can believe it, and it hurts me on a personal level."
Outside the building, Ochako and Izuku had reached their destination. The fifth floor window loomed right beside them, and Izuku could see the faint outlines of two figures moving behind the glass.
"This is it," he whispered against her ear. His hands finally, reluctantly, pulled away from her chest. "Use your Quirk on me and throw me through that window."
Ochako spun in the air to face him, her whole face still flushed but her eyes full of determination.
"Got it!"
Ochako touched his shoulder with her free hand. Izuku instantly felt his entire body lose all its weight.
"GO!"
Ochako wound up and hurled him at the window with both hands and every last ounce of strength she could muster. Izuku spun through the air, whipping his nunchaku out in front of him with explosive force.
CRASH!
The window blew inward in a shower of glittering fragments.
Inside the fifth floor room, Bakugo and Iida were in the middle of an argument.
"I'm telling you, I'm going DOWN there to smash that nerd's face in!" Bakugo snarled. He was already halfway to the exit, one hand popping sparks and the other stabbing a finger into Iida's chest. "You wanna play gatekeeper up here? Fine. I'll drag his unconscious body back as a trophy."
"Bakugo-kun, we agreed on a defensive formation!" Iida planted himself in front of him with his hand raised. "The strategy I designed puts both of us in this room to protect the weapon! Abandoning the fifth floor undermines the entire tactical structure of our...!"
"Your strategy is BORING," Bakugo cut in with a sneer. "Deku's a sneaky little nerd. Smashing him's gonna take me five seconds. Stay up here and babysit your stupid missile if you want, but I'm NOT waiting around for..."
CRASH
Both of them spun around in unison, jaws dropping as glass rained across the floor. Bakugo's eyes flew wide while Iida took an instinctive step back. A dark silhouette dropped through the opening, twisted mid-fall, and landed in a crouch on the tiles.
Izuku's hand shot up. The nunchaku that had shattered the window came flying back into his palm in a clean arc, and with a press of his thumb against the handle, the two halves locked together and extended, forming a sharp scythe that gleamed under the building's lighting.
"Hey there, Bombardinian," he said with a grin. "Miss me?"
Bakugo's face cycled through several emotions in half a second before settling on incandescent fury.
"DEKU, YOU SON OF A...!"
Izuku was already moving. In one fluid motion, he whipped the scythe horizontally at Iida's legs.
The engine student's reflexes kicked in. He tried to run, his motors coming to life.
But the scythe was already there.
The curved blade caught him between the ankles mid-stride.
"Wh...?!"
Iida's armored boot came down right into the path of the weapon, his own momentum trapping the shaft between his ankles as his body pitched forward in a spectacular face plant. He crashed into the tiles with a metallic clatter that rang through the entire room.
BOOM
Bakugo, who was exactly two steps from the exit door, started snapping out of his shock.
How the hell did that damn Deku get up here?!, his brain screamed. More importantly, HOW DID I NOT NOTICE?!
Behind Izuku, a second shadow drifted softly through the broken window. Ochako floated in with her arms extended, and before her feet could touch the tiles, her fingertips were already brushing against cracked rubble and chunks of plaster that her entry had knocked loose.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Every piece of debris she touched lost its weight and started drifting into the air around her in a slow, silent cloud.
Bakugo's pupils shrank.
"ROUND FACE," he growled, "I don't know what the hell you're planning, but I'm NOT letting you do it!"
He launched forward. Both palms detonated behind him, rocketing him across the room, his open hands stretching out toward Ochako with orange sparks already forming between his fingers.
"OCHAKO, MOVE!" Izuku shouted.
Ochako was already moving, and what she did next surprised even her.
She shoved both palms toward Bakugo with a grunt of effort, and something strange happened inside her own Quirk. A sensation she'd never felt before rushed down her arms, poured out through her fingertips, and flowed into the cloud of weightless debris around her.
The chunks of concrete shot outward.
Not a single one of them was in her hands when they launched. They blasted across the room in a wave, aimed straight at Bakugo. Ochako stared at her palms with her mouth hanging open.
Wh-what was that?!, she thought in shock. I didn't even touch them! I just... pushed, and they...!
Bakugo's boots hit the floor and his instincts took over. Both palms came up and a rapid string of point blank detonations tore through the incoming projectiles, reducing them to harmless gravel that scattered across the ground.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT, ROUND FACE?!" he roared.
"I don't know!" Ochako answered with a slightly hysterical laugh. "I'm figuring it out as I go!"
Izuku didn't waste the opening. He triggered the magnetic recall on his belt. The scythe pulled free from Iida's legs and flew back into his hand. With a click of the button, it collapsed back down into its nunchaku form.
Bakugo came at him in a fury. His left palm swung in a wide hook with an explosion already blooming in his fingertips.
Izuku brought the nunchaku up fast, caught Bakugo's forearm in the chain, and redirected the entire blow off to the side.
BOOM
The detonation went off a full meter from its target and blew a scorched crater into the concrete wall.
"Tch!" Bakugo bared his teeth. "HOLD STILL, DAMMIT!"
"No way."
"I'M GONNA SHOVE THOSE NUNCHAKUS DOWN YOUR THROAT!"
"You're welcome to try."
Behind them, Iida started to move.
Everything happened way too fast, he thought as he climbed to his feet. I have to back up Bakugo-kun!
His helmet snapped toward Izuku, his motors roared to life, and he launched forward in a blur of armored motion, fully intending to tackle the classmate who had just humiliated him.
Ochako saw him coming. She stretched her hand out again, and that same distant pressure rushed down her palm and shot across the room to wrap around Iida in midair.
All of a sudden, Iida's body felt impossibly heavy. Every step left a visible dent in the floor as his weight climbed exponentially.
Wh-why am I so heavy?!, he thought frantically. My body feels three times, no, four times heavier than normal! Every muscle in my legs is screaming!
He looked up and his visor locked onto Ochako, who was twenty meters away with her palm still outstretched toward him.
Uraraka-kun. She can make things heavier too?!
A new strategy clicked into place instantly.
Bakugo-kun is engaging Midoriya-kun in close combat. Midoriya-kun is dangerous, but the more critical threat to our position has become Uraraka-kun. If I can neutralize her Quirk usage, Bakugo-kun's overwhelming firepower will decide the engagement in our favor.
He pivoted on the boot sunk into the crater, gritted his teeth, and launched himself at Ochako with everything he had.
Izuku caught the shift in Iida's stance out of the corner of his eye.
"Oh no you don't," he muttered.
He faked a nunchaku strike to Bakugo's face, and the instant Bakugo's arms came up to block it, Izuku dropped his elbow and drove it straight into Bakugo's stomach.
"GHK...!"
The air rushed out of Bakugo's lungs in a choked gasp and his body folded forward a few inches. Izuku stepped back, cocked his arm, and hurled the nunchaku across the room at Iida's legs, using the same trick that had worked the first time.
Iida was ready.
"Not twice, Midoriya-kun!"
His body rotated at the last possible instant, the nunchaku grazed the outside of his armored thigh, and the weapon went skidding harmlessly across the floor behind him. He kept charging at Ochako without losing an ounce of speed, his motors roaring against the unnatural weight still dragging at him.
Ochako gritted her teeth.
He's too fast. Even with the extra weight, he's too fast!
She threw her hands above her head and clenched her fists.
"RELEASE EVERYTHING!" she shouted.
Every chunk of debris that Bakugo had blasted apart seconds earlier, every piece of concrete and shattered tile that had been drifting aimlessly in the air, obeyed her command. The entire suspended cloud froze for a single heartbeat.
And then it dropped.
A wall of weightless shrapnel came crashing down on Iida from above. He skidded to a halt with his arms thrown up over his head, his visor whipping left and right in a frantic attempt to track every angle of attack at once.
"Th-this is...!"
Ochako's hands moved again, and that distant pressure in her palms surged back to life.
The debris stopped falling in midair. Every fragment reversed course, converged on Iida from all sides, and locked around his body with a deafening, grinding crunch. In the space of a single second, the flying shrapnel had compressed itself into a rough, jagged stone sarcophagus that sealed him from the neck down.
Iida's helmet stuck out of the top of the prison, eyes blown wide behind his visor.
Sh-she can do this?!, his brain screamed. Uraraka-kun, since when are you capable of this?!
Ochako stared at her hands with her mouth hanging open, breathing hard.
"Did I... just do that?" she whispered to herself.
Bakugo straightened up with a furious gasp, one hand pressed against his stomach. His eyes darted to the nunchaku lying abandoned on the floor on the far side of the room, and then back to Izuku, who no longer had a weapon within reach.
A savage grin spread across his face.
"You just lost your toy, nerd."
He lunged. His right palm swung in a brutal backhand and detonated point blank against Izuku's face.
BAM
The explosion caught Izuku in the chest and launched him backward with brutal force, slamming him into the concrete wall and cracking the surface.
Izuku coughed hard and peeled himself off the wall with his teeth clenched.
O-okay. That one actually hurt.
Across the room, Bakugo spun on his heel and leveled both palms at the concrete prison holding Iida.
"FOUR EYES, QUIT EMBARRASSING YOURSELF AND GET UP!"
Twin explosions tore through the sarcophagus in a tight, controlled burst. The concrete blew outward in a cloud of dust and Iida staggered free of the wreckage, coughing and rolling his shoulders to shake off the worst of the impact.
In the monitor room, Kirishima was on his feet.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?! URARAKA JUST BURIED IIDA IN A STONE CAGE! AND MIDORIYA IS STILL STANDING AFTER BAKUGO SLAMMED HIM THROUGH A WALL! THESE TWO ARE INSANE!"
Momo hadn't looked away from the screen for a single second. Her hands were clasped so tightly at her waist that her knuckles had gone white.
The boost has given her access to a passive gravitational component of her Quirk that she'd never accessed before, her brain reasoned behind her carefully composed features. Contact with Midoriya-kun amplified its output and expanded the functional range of the ability itself.
"Come on, Uraraka-san," she whispered to herself. "Finish it."
Next to her, All Might was watching the screen with a very different expression. His hand had settled on his chin as he stood there in thought.
Incredible, he thought. Young Uraraka is adapting to a completely unknown expansion of her own Quirk in the middle of a real fight, with the quiet confidence of a partner who trusts she can handle it.
He watched Izuku scoop the nunchaku off the floor in a single leap and come up already spinning it into a defensive pattern, while behind him Ochako's orbit of debris whipped around to intercept Bakugo's next charge.
Young Uraraka controls the terrain while young Midoriya disrupts and strikes, All Might thought with a faint smile tugging at his lips. The two of them move in perfect complement to each other without a single hand signal passing between them. Give those two a few years of training and I can absolutely see them opening their own hero agency together when they graduate. What a remarkable partnership is taking shape.
He cleared his throat softly and filed the observation away for later.
Although, he added to himself as a fresh bead of sweat rolled down his temple, I'm also going to need to have a very careful conversation with young Midoriya about acceptable combat initiation techniques.
Back on the fifth floor, Bakugo's next charge slammed into a wall of floating debris. Slabs of rock swung in to intercept him from three angles at once, forcing him to burn explosion after explosion just to claw his way through the barricade. Every fragment he destroyed was replaced by another, and every detonation burned off a little more of the nitroglycerin sweat in his palms.
"HOLD STILL, ROUND FACE!" he bellowed.
"Not a chance!" Ochako shot back, and the grin she threw at him had gone from nervous to absolutely feral.
Iida tried to flank the storm from the left. Ochako's palm snapped in his direction and a slab of concrete the size of a dining table slammed into his shoulder with a sharp crack, throwing him a full meter sideways into the wall.
"Uraraka-kun, this level of control is...!" he started, but he cut himself off as another chunk of debris clipped his helmet and sent him staggering.
"I'm sorry, Iida-kun!" Ochako yelled. "Nothing personal!"
Izuku slipped through the chaos. He ducked under a flying piece of tile and came out in a full sprint toward the far side of the room, where the mock black weapon was parked.
"DEKU!"
Bakugo abandoned his assault on Ochako and launched himself across the room in a single massive explosion, his palms already loaded with everything he had left.
"DEKU, YOU'RE NOT BEATING ME, YOU HEAR ME?! NEVER!"
"Ochako, NOW!" Izuku shouted without looking back.
Ochako's hands came together above her head.
Every piece of debris in the room converged on Bakugo in a single coordinated collapse. A full sphere of flying stone sealed around him in midair, locking him inside a rotating prison of rubble that wrenched his trajectory sideways and away from Izuku's path.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS...?!"
His explosions detonated inside the sphere, blowing rock in every direction, but for every piece that broke apart, three more pressed in from the outside. It was a storm of orange light trapped at the center of a grinding stone planet, and every second he stayed airborne, the sphere carried him farther from the weapon.
Izuku ran at full speed.
His hand slapped against the cold black surface of the mock missile a second later.
The intercom crackled loudly overhead.
"HERO TEAM, WINS!"
Silence fell across the fifth floor. The debris sphere lost all cohesion at once and collapsed around Bakugo in a thunderous heap, leaving him on his hands and knees in the middle of the pile, his chest heaving and his knuckles pressed against the floor.
I lost. How the HELL did I lose?
Ochako slumped against the nearest wall and slid down until she was sitting with her legs stretched out in front of her, breathing hard. Her fingertips pressed together one last time.
"Release," she gasped, and every loose fragment of debris in the room dropped gently back onto the tiles.
Izuku stepped away from the mock weapon and crossed the room to her in a few quick strides. He crouched down in front of her and smiled.
"We did it."
Ochako looked up at him with an exhausted, triumphant smile.
"We did it."
Behind Izuku, Bakugo punched the floor hard enough to crack it, and somewhere in the middle of the dust, Iida was slowly climbing to his feet and trying to restore his dignity by adjusting his helmet with both hands.
In the monitor room, Kirishima was already yelling again at the top of his lungs.
"THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE! URARAKA MADE A WHOLE ROOM FLOAT! MIDORIYA DID A FLIP AND CAUGHT A SCYTHE IN MIDAIR! THEY'RE LIKE A MOVIE DUO! I WANT TO FIGHT THEM RIGHT NOW!"
"They really are something special, aren't they?" Momo said quietly, and the note of genuine pride in her voice was impossible for anyone nearby to miss.
All Might straightened his posture, turned to the class with his smile back at full power, and raised a hand toward the screen.
"HERO TEAM! AN UNUSUAL OPENING MANEUVER, A BOLD EXECUTION, AND A REMARKABLE DEMONSTRATION OF QUIRK GROWTH UNDER PRESSURE FROM YOUNG URARAKA! WELL DONE TO BOTH OF YOU! COME BACK TO THE OBSERVATION ROOM SO WE CAN REVIEW THE MATCH!"
He dropped the volume of his voice a notch and rubbed the back of his neck one last time, the nervous sweat coming back full force.
Yeah, he thought. A bold execution.
********
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