The U.A. gates were ridiculous.
Twenty meters tall, reinforced steel, the words "PLUS ULTRA" carved into the arch like someone had looked at a normal school entrance and said "no, make it intimidating." The whole thing screamed we are very important and you are very small.
Izuku walked through them with his hands in his hoodie pockets and thought, 'It's a school. It's a school for teenagers. Why does it look like the entrance to Mordor.'
The gauntlet sat heavy on his right forearm, hidden under two layers of black cotton and a compression sleeve. Version 3.0. Ceramic buffer caps. Thermistor kill-switch. A revised discharge cycle that had stopped burning him about six weeks ago. Mostly.
October air. Cold. Grey. Smelled like rain that hadn't made up its mind yet.
Headphones on. Svrge. "DARK THOUGHT." Bass low enough to live in his chest instead of his ears.
He looked at the crowd of applicants ahead of him and thought, 'NPCs.'
Then immediately felt guilty about it. They were real people. Teenagers. Kids with dreams and quirks and parents who probably hugged them this morning and said "do your best, sweetie."
'Still NPCs though.'
He spotted Bakugou in under four seconds. Impossible not to. The kid was a walking weather system, shoving through the crowd with his shoulders like other applicants were furniture that had been placed inconveniently in his hallway.
Their eyes almost met.
Bakugou's face did three things at once. Recognition. Contempt. Something colder underneath both.
"OI—"
Izuku had already looked away. Same pace. Same direction. The music swallowed Bakugou's voice and left nothing.
'Still doing that. Still waiting for a reaction. Buddy, I deadlifted 160 kilos this morning and have a shadow dog living in my spine. I do not have the bandwidth for whatever this is.'
He found a seat in the auditorium near the back. Did not remove his headphones.
Present Mic was on stage doing his thing. Izuku ran the numbers in his head instead of listening to a man who'd clearly had four energy drinks before 9 AM.
Three robot types. One, two, three pointers. Zero-pointer as a fear mechanic. Rescue points as the hidden variable that nobody in the audience knew about but he did, because he'd watched the anime.
'The whole exam is a filter. Rewards people who fight loud and flashy. People who need to be seen.'
A girl two rows ahead of him. Brown hair. Round face. She got accidentally levitated by someone testing a quirk in the seats. She caught herself. Good reflexes.
An elbow from his left.
He turned his head slowly.
The boy beside him was tall, stiff as a flagpole, and looked like he'd been class president since birth and considered it a moral calling. Glasses. Serious face. Iida Tenya, if he was remembering the series right.
The boy pointed at the headphones. His mouth was moving.
Izuku just looked at him.
Didn't speak. Didn't blink with any particular urgency. Just turned the full weight of his attention onto this boy's face and held it there. Flat. Dark. The look of someone who was thinking about something else entirely and had decided this interaction wasn't going to be part of their day.
Iida's mouth slowed. Stopped.
He turned back to face the front.
'Thought so.'
***
The fake city was enormous.
Izuku stood at the gate with thirty other applicants packed in around him and looked at the street grid and thought about topology.
Three entry corridors. Widest one down the center. That's where the robots would be thickest, because the designers assumed most applicants would funnel through it.
He'd go center. Not for the targets. For the cover once the robots were broken open.
Present Mic's voice crackled over the speakers.
"—are you ready?!"
The applicants coiled. Weight shifting forward. Quirks sparking in small visible ways. A boy to his right started vibrating and smelled like engine exhaust.
"Let's go— PLUS ULTRA! START!"
Half a second of collective confusion. Already? No buzzer? No countdown? Everyone looked at each other waiting for someone else to move first.
Izuku was already gone.
Twenty silent steps while the crowd was still processing. He could hear them behind him through the headphones. The delayed scramble. Someone shouting. The first explosive pop of a quirk going off.
He didn't look back.
The city swallowed him.
***
The 3-pointer dropped from behind a building facade on his left. Six legs. Central chassis at chest height. Sensor cluster at the front, exposed and obvious.
It tracked him. Raised a forward limb.
'Two seconds to fire. Maybe three. Targeting lags if I close fast enough.'
He accelerated.
Inside the gauntlet, the accelerometer woke up. That familiar hum, the vibration of something functional and ready.
Four steps.
The robot's limb was still rising.
He stepped past the arc of the swing, into the dead zone where the machine's own body worked against it. Planted his back foot. Drove the gauntlet into the junction where the chassis met the primary strut.
Triggered the discharge.
The shockwave cracked outward. A detonation that moved through steel and circuit board and mounting bracket and spread in every direction at once. The robot's chassis ripped open. Front section peeling from the rear, actuators shearing, the sensor cluster shattering across twenty feet of asphalt.
The whole machine dropped.
Ozone. Sharp and electric. The smell that had permanently attached itself to his right forearm over ten months of testing.
He stood in the wreckage cloud and exhaled.
His arm hummed up to the shoulder. Vibration still working its way out through bone.
Gauntlet counter: 1.
Behind him, the rest of the applicants were finally entering the city. Explosions. Shouting. The metallic shriek of someone's quirk tearing through aluminum.
Full chaos.
'Perfect.'
He rolled his neck. The bass in his headphones dropped low enough to feel like weather.
'Let's see how many there are.'
He disappeared into the city.
Behind him, the broken robot smoked quietly in the intersection.
No one had seen him do it.
TO BE CONTINUED